Lovay Fine Arts is delighted to announce its participation in Paris Internationale 2024 with Suzanne Santoro (Brooklyn, *1946). This will be our first exhibition with the artist, and we’ll present two never-seen-before series Santoro created between 2004 and 2012.
Known since the early 1970s for her influential series Black Mirrors, she has dedicated her life to the poetics and the politics of a female gaze on women.
Blood Roses (2004-2009) and Femaleness (2006-2012), the two series of paintings on paper we are presenting, are part of a larger body of work that Santoro started in the 1990s. They were made through the repetition of motifs and gestures that are related to the origin of painting and that Santoro calls organic gesture, a movement starting as an impulse from the body, through the arm, and towards the paper.
Santoro proceeds in series, repeating similar gestures to formalize unpredictable and ancestral structures and forms, always linked to female representation but taking on multiple and polymorphic appearances. After she worked with appropriation, photography, and sculpture for about 20 years, the simple process of painting seemed a natural tool to continue to explore this theme.
The Blood Roses series develops the flower as a feminine symbol connected to the female lunar cycle. The flowers have bilateral symmetry, raising the theme of the double (ongoing in her art since the early 1970s) and standing as a metaphor for her relationship with the Other. For these paintings, Santoro used tempera on colored paper, producing thick, deep, and intense compositions.
The Femaleness works are watercolors on paper that depict women in movement (seemingly dancing), synthesizing a sedimentation of centuries of female representations. Their transversal references come from Santoro’s vast and long research on the representation of the female figure in Western iconography.
Beyond its feminist position, the strength of her work lies in how she addresses the history of representation. Santoro is questioning what and who is represented. And how do we see it? Her work offers multidimensional and spectral metaphors.
* 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, where 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.
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.
