VALIE EXPORT & KETTY LA ROCCA: BODY SIGN Exhibition review by Mariia Rybalchenko
The second exhibition in the new space at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in the Palazzo Belgioioso, curated by Andrea Maurer and Alberto Salvadori, brings together works by two artists from the 1960s and 1970s who used their bodies as a central physical medium: VALIE EXPORT (Austria, b. 1940) and Ketty La Rocca (Italy, 1938–1976). The title of the exhibition comes from VALIE EXPORT’s famous action in Frankfurt in 1970, where the artist had a suspender belt and the hem of a stocking tattooed on her upper thigh as a symbol of femininity determined by men. The two artists never met, but shared the same source for their creations, at the crossroads of semiotics, photography and performance: the body as a tool revealing the contradictions between female expression in public and in private, subject to ideological conditions; the body as a system of non-verbal meaning.
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