Lovay Fine Arts

Suzanne Santoro

Blood Roses

17 January– 08 March 2025
Vernissage - Quartier des Bains
Thursday 16 January
18:00-20:30

Lovay Fine Arts is delighted to announce the first exhibition with Suzanne Santoro (Brooklyn, * 1946). We are showing a large group of the Blood Roses series (2004-2009), an homage to femininity.

Santoro’s series Blood Roses (2004-2009) is part of a decades-long inquiry into the repressed iconography of women’s sexual morphology. These all-over tempera paintings on colored paper, are based on a single painterly gesture that starts as a physical impulse translating a circular form suggesting the shape of a flower. They articulate Santoro’s ongoing research on female sexual expression and the attempt to articulate a new visual vocabulary able to translate the experience of being a woman.

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.

–> Read a text by Giovanna Zapperi written for this exhibition.

Works list

Suzanne Santoro
by Giovanna Zapperi
(excerpt)

A young graduate from the School of Visual Arts in New York, Suzanne Santoro settled in Rome around 1969. There, she began to explore the exposition and concealment of women’s bodies in the history of art across the city, where she searched for visual signs of an unseen female presence, and the hidden histories of female expression. Santoro was interested in looking at the ways in which the female sex had been hidden and stylized and therefore erased from representation.[1]

While working in photography, sculpture, text, artist’s books, and drawing, Santoro developed a visual vocabulary that was equally informed by the late 1960s “conceptual turn” and her participation in the Italian women’s movement. Since the early 1970s, Santoro’s work has unfolded within a set of ideas and practices that resonates with her personal experience of the Italian feminist movement. She became part of the Rivolta Femminile, a separatist group collective that Carla Lonzi – a prominent feminist thinker and former art critic – had founded with the artist Carla Accardi and other women.

Santoro’s series Blood Roses (2004–2009) is part of a decades-long inquiry into the repressed iconography of women’s sexual morphology. These all-over tempera paintings on colored paper are based on a single painterly gesture that starts as a physical impulse translating a circular form suggesting the shape of a flower. They pursue Santoro’s ongoing research on female sexual expression and the attempt to articulate a new visual vocabulary able to translate the experience of being a woman.

Whereas her 1970s focused on the gendered structures of representation via juxtaposition of texts, photography, and drawings, in the late 1980s Santoro started to experiment with what she calls “organic gestures,” in a larger body of work composed of several series exploring different aspects of the entwinement between painting and embodied experience. These series are organized around a pattern repetition in which the artist goes through singular gestures and corresponding iconographic motifs that range from biomorphic-cosmic imagery to the representation of the dancing female body in antiquity or objects such as vases and natural elements like flowers and leaves.

Santoro’s conceptualization of “organic gestures” in relation to the creative process is strongly indebted to her activity as a child art therapist at the Istituto di Ortofonologia in Rome, where she started to work in 1986 as the head of the painting and graphic workshop. There she worked with deaf and autistic children and became interested in the cognitive development unveiled in the graphic process. This led her to conceptualize a sort of drawing impulse defining the language that articulates children’s nonverbal self-expression before being put aside in favor of speech and writing. For the artist, the repression of drawing as a legitimate expressive language has to do with the hegemony of patriarchal rationality in adult life. Her idea of an organic gesture therefore refers to the repressed connection between bodily experiences and self-expression.

Whereas the relationship between the body and the act of painting is a recurrent feature in the history of postwar Western art, it takes a specific orientation in the framework of Santoro’s reflection on female creative and sexual expression. Her Blood Roses, with their evocative shapes and hallucinatory power, are a search for nonpatriarchal representations of women’s sexuality. Santoro’s predominant use of red tempera gives a visceral aspect to the flower-shaped forms, which intensifies the color’s association with the female sex by its explicit reference to blood and menstruation.


Santoro’s uncanny Blood Roses appropriate familiar tropes of femininity through a different gaze, with the woman enunciating herself as the subject of her own sexuality. Their repetition generates a form of heightened perception, in which the reassuring shape of the flower as a metonym for female beauty turns into its disturbing obverse. The Blood Roses unveil the menstruating female body as the off-scene of culture, suppressed from both discursive and visual representation. In their ambivalent reference to female sexual morphology, these works express aspects of women’s embodied experience that have been historically obliterated. In her relentless search across the multiple tropes of female imageries, the Blood Roses represent a crucial moment in Santoro’s lifelong endeavor to unveil a set of hidden meanings that acquire new significance through a contemporary feminist perspective.



[1] Suzanne Santoro, Towards New Expression | Per una espressione nuova, Rome, Scritti di Rivolta femminile, 1974.

PDF

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.

Read more