Lovay Fine Arts

Lovay Fine Arts

Suzanne Santoro

CFA Live Milano

14 February– 28 March 2025
Opening
Thursday 13 February
19:00-21:00

Suzanne Santoro

Suzanne Santoro was born in 1946 in Brooklyn and graduated from the School of Visual Arts, New York. In the late 1960s she moved to Italy.

She was part of the feminist group Rivolta Femminile, alongside Carla Lonzi (1931-1982) and Carla Accardi (1924-2014), and participated in numerous women-only exhibitions. In 1976, together with Carla Accardi, Nedda Guidi, and Stephanie Oursler, she founded the Cooperativa Beato Angelico, the first women’s art space in Rome. There they exhibited their contemporary works and alternated exhibitions with overlooked historical women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabetta Sirani, and Regina Bracchi.

In the early 1970s, Santoro used postcards bought from museum shops, which she appropriated and signed with a bold golden Sharpie marker. This series led directly to her most significant body of work, Black Mirrors. Inspired by the old lead mirrors she encountered in palazzos and museums in Rome, Santoro’s Black Mirrors series is shadowy portraits of representations of women in Western history, made from photographs taken by the artist, mounted on wood panels, and then covered with resin and a polished mirror finish. In the same period, she created a series of resin sculptures directly referring to female anatomy, cast on her own body.

In 1974, Santoro published an artist book titled Towards New Expression, combining short texts, drawings, and images culled from art history and related to female genitalia. It was censored at the London ICA’s Artists’ Books exhibition in 1976.

From 1985 to 2009, Santoro worked as an Art Therapist at the Istituto di Ortofonologia of Rome, where she was responsible for children’s graphic development, mainly working with deaf kids. Her method considered spontaneous (organic) drawing as a cognitive process through which children could reconnect deeply with themselves and the external world. As an artist looking for anthropological visual structures, she identified what she calls “organic gestures” in children’s squiggles, which greatly informed her own practice.

Santoro’s artistic practice has been a rich journey into the realm of female representation and its hidden structures. informed by her decades of study, she reflects on the partial erasure of women throughout Western art history, unveiling the visible in the invisible. In the past 50 years, working as a visual iconographer, she has been creating innovative and idiosyncratic representations of the visible and invisible of woman.

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