VALIE EXPORT and Ketty La Rocca at Thaddaeus Ropac Two feminist visions in dialogue

Thaddaeus Ropac Milan gallery presents Body Sign, its second exhibition since its opening, from December 16, 2025 to February 28, 2026, staged in the spaces of Palazzo Belgioioso. The exhibition project, curated by Andrea Maurer and Alberto Salvadori in collaboration with Studio VALIE EXPORT and the Ketty La Rocca Archive, offers a direct confrontation between two central figures of European conceptual art of the 1960s: VALIE EXPORT and Ketty La Rocca. The opening is scheduled for Tuesday, Dec. 16, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. The path of the exhibition starts from a consideration shared by the two artists, both of whom were committed to defining new ways of representing the female body within a patriarchal cultural system. Although they work in different cities and contexts, Vienna for EXPORT and Florence for La Rocca, their research develops important points of contact. Both understood the body as a field of action and as a linguistic tool, analyzing the distance between public and private expressions and highlighting the need to expand the space for women’s intervention in cultural debate. EXPORT recalled how in those years it was necessary to “develop other forms of language outside the male-dominated system,” while La Rocca observed that women were forced to employ a foreign and hostile language.

In their works, the body becomes a means of crossing, contradicting or expanding the codes of visual communication. Hands, a recurring element in both of their researches, assume a central role as the primary perceptual organ and vehicle of nonverbal meanings. In Appendix for a Plea (1972), La Rocca explores the potential of gesture through a sequence of movements made by male and female hands, defining gesture as an immediate and universal language. EXPORT, in Tapp und Tastkino (Touch Cinema, 1968), invites the audience to touch her breasts through a box that transforms the torso into a touch screen, pushing the performance beyond the visual dimension traditionally associated with cinema. The artist defines the work as an exploration of the body as cinematic material, in which skin replaces the screen and engages the viewer in a direct physical experience. The intervention also questions the voyeuristic dynamic with which the female body is observed in the media. This focus on physicality contrasts with the dematerialization of the art object typical ofconceptual art.