Curator: Monika Branicka<\/p>\n
The exhibition of Mariuccia Secol \u2013 1968. II Genesi<\/i> marks the first presentation of this Italian artist\u2019s work in Poland. We chose for this display a remarkable series of paintings from 1968\u20131969, entitled II Genesi<\/i> (The Second Beginning<\/i>). This body of work reflects a pivotal moment, both in the history of Italy\u2019s social transformation and in Secol\u2019s artistic journey.<\/p>\n
Born in 1929, Secol recalls this period as an era of rebellion\u2014not her own, but that of her children\u2019s generation, who took part in tumultuous protests and political upheavals. Yet it was precisely at this time that Secol sensed a shift\u2014not only within the conservative Italian society but also within herself, as both a woman and an artist.<\/p>\n
The paintings she created then, paradoxically traditional, made using the ancient encaustic technique with natural beeswax, embody the artist\u2019s own rebirth. II Genesi<\/i> consists of abstract works, in which form, colour, and texture subtly evoke fragments of the female body\u2014the symbolic battleground in the struggle for freedom at the time. This series was also her final cycle of paintings; thereafter, she dedicated herself primarily to textiles, sculpture, and textile-based objects.<\/p>\n
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This house stands utop a hill in a tiny town in northern Italy, set between Lago Maggiore and Lago di Como. The view from the windows opens onto a fantastic garden, populated by grand trees over a century old set against a breathtaking vista of the valley below. It\u2019s paradise. The house is inhabited by the 96-year-old artist Mariuccia Secol. It was in houses such as this one, that the often forgotten cultural revolution of the 1960s took place.<\/b><\/p>\n
The start of the 1960s was mild, not giving any hints about what was set to happen. After finishing her artistic education, Mariuccia Secol married a renowned doctor, partisan, future mayor of the town, and they had four children together. Their house soon became the gathering place for the local intellectual elite. Mariuccia did what most Italian wives and mothers: she took care of the family, the house, guests, dogs and cats and she cooked delicious risotto. However, despite her roles of the doctors wife, mother, cook and cleaner, she had one more\u2013an artist. She could be considered lucky that her husband was not adverse to that, as he painted himself \u2013 though as an artist he is unlikely to go down in the history of art. The whole family was closely linked to art: familiar artists, writers, journalists and composers frequently visited their house to converse about art and politics all while savouring her famed risotto. \u201cOur house quickly became a kind of cultural centre, where artists came and went, inviting new ones.\u201d –<\/i> reminisces Mariuccia. In the attic she created her studio space, where she painted abstract works typical of the 1950s and 1960s.<\/p>\n
Around a decade later, Mariuccia wrote a short story\u2013a fable about Maria, who cooks delicious risotto daily for all of her seventeen children: one day a yellow one, the next\u2013red, the following with peas, after that with shrimp, then beans, wine, frog legs, with chestnuts, with champagne, with mushrooms and another one with quail. Then, after having cooked risotto a million times, she decided to cook a risotto \u2026 with love. Soon the risotto takes over her whole house: the red one climbes into bed, the white one enters into plant pots, yellow scrambles into ashtrays, the one with frog legs makes its way into humidifiers, shrimp climbs into the television set, and that quail one into the radio. And before Maria notices the risotto with love wraps itself around her neck to strangle her.<\/p>\n
The year 1968 arrived. Europe was seething. Mariuccia Secol\u2019s children were attending political demonstrations. \u201cThe young were fighting the system, and within them my sons and daughters along with their friends. However, my role of housekeeper remained unchanged. I was constantly cooking for the young people involved in the fight. While other artists were working on ways to represent this struggle, I wasn\u2019t able to take up this subject. It wasn\u2019t my fight, despite that as a parent I was naturally very involved\u201d<\/i> she recalls.<\/p>\n
In March of the same year, one of Mariuccia\u2019s close friends and writer \u2013 Guido Piovene gifts her his book titled Furies<\/i>. Mariuccia made him a promise then, which Piovene commemorated in a dedication on the first page: \u201cFor Mariuccia Secol, who promised, she would allow me to find \u2013 bettered \u2013 some of these Furies in her paintings\u201d<\/i>. In that moment something irreversibly breaks <\/i><\/b>in Mariuccia. She paints the series II. Genesi<\/i>. It is the last series of paintings she ever makes, she never returned to painting. With that, a new Mariuccia Secol is born: a feminist. \u201cIn the political movement of 1968, young people were very close to the social situation of women. It was also happening at home, therefore it concerned me even more. It seemed as though my children had become my allies against their father \u2013 the mighty man of the house. It was visible even more so, as my husband was an excellent professional, a well respected and revered doctor in our community. We were the weaker, subordinate side \u2013 but at the same time allied, consequently undermining the paternal domination. It was that inferior group, that opposed the authorities by fighting. Personally, I felt discomfort, because the patriarchal culture which formed me, was pressuring me to comply, making me co-responsible. This, in turn, gave birth to my conscious rebellion, which allowed me to change the situation. The title of this series is supposed to signify the birth of another person, built on new ideals. A new person.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
After II. Genesi<\/i> there was no returning to the old life. Secol realised that \u201cwomen have no voice and we don\u2019t exist\u201d<\/i>. That inspired her following works of art \u2013\u00a0abstract sculptures made of prefabricated plastic elements used in building sites, entitled Silent Musical Instruments <\/i>(1970). In the ensuing years she started using textiles as her artistic medium, her sculptures were now being made from her old clothes. Secol then proceeded to create artworks based on broken plates and steel scouring pads, which she named Instruments of Women\u2019s Roles<\/i> (1975). Her pieces speak about domestic violence, exclusion and abortion. After reading Henrik Ibsen\u2019s A Doll\u2019s House<\/i>, Mariuccia Secol began working on series under the same title, which she continued for many years. One of the newer works, made after the year 2000 are small, abstract Obstacles for Dolls.<\/i> When asked about their meaning she replies \u201c\u2026it\u2019s for girls to learn, that their life won\u2019t be easy.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
Boycotting household chores became the core of Mariuccia\u2019s artistic practice. She was not alone in that approach. Her closest friend Milli Gandini \u2013 a fellow artist, used barbed wire to tie pots and pans together with their lids. She also sent her husband and children to eat meals in the restaurant on the ground floor of the building they lived in on a daily basis. At home she prohibited them from dusting any surfaces. After a larger amount of dust accumulated on the furniture, Milli used her finger to write in it the words: Salario al Lavoro domestico<\/i> – Salary for Household Labour.<\/i><\/p>\n
Their art was socially engaged: the artists organised themselves into a \u201cfeminist-creative\u201d collective, they protested, wrote manifests, published texts in the journal Le operaje della casa (The House Workers<\/i>) and made contact with feminist groups in different parts of Italy. Aesthetic necessity wasn\u2019t something that motivated their art, rather, it was real pain and anger and they found that activism had a tangible social effect.<\/p>\n
Secol and Gandini weren\u2019t the only ones who used sabotaging household chores as a subversive artistic practise. This phenomenon was noticeable around the world. The same year that Mariuccia stretches her apron onto frames instead of a canvas (Instrument\u2019s of Women\u2019s Roles, 1975), <\/i>Austrian artist Birgit <\/i>J\u00fcrgenssen creates the object Housewife\u2019s Kitchen Apron<\/i> and the American artist Martha Rosler films her seminal video Semiotics of the Kitchen<\/i>. In Italy similar themes are explored by Mirella Bentivoglio, Tomaso Binga (Bianca Menna) and Ketty la Rocca, and in Poland by artists such as Maria Pini\u0144ska-Bere\u015b and Ewa Partum. The revolution whose main weapons were aprons, pots, pans and vacuum cleaners erupted in kitchens across the globe.<\/p>\n
A petite Mariuccia Secol, with thin, wrinkled hands sits on the edge of her bed and tells stories of the events that took place over half a century ago. She remembers everything. She talks about how in 1974, together with Milli and other women (Clemen Parocchetti, Silvia Cibaldi, Mariagrazia Sironi) they created the feminist activism group Immagine<\/i> (Gruppo Femminista Immagine di Varese). In 1976 they traveled to Verona, to protest in front of the courthouse, where a trial for rape was taking place \u2013 there, for the first time in Italy, under the pressure of feminist protests, a rapist was sentenced for his act. She also talks about 1977, when on stage at a festival in Frascati they wrote: \u201cLove is also a household chore\u201d. About how in Milan they organised a conference about visual art titled \u201cWoman, Art, Society\u201d<\/i>, at which they proclaimed equal rights for women and mothers within the official art system. She also recounts their biggest success, the exhibition Spazio Aperto<\/i> presented during the 1978 Biennale in Venice.<\/p>\n
Mariuccia now shows me her book, in which \u2013 together with Milli \u2013 they wrote down everything. She published the book recently, at the age of 92. The title was inspired by their joint exhibition of 1980 in Varese La mamma \u00e9 uscita (Mother Has Left). <\/i>On the occasion of this exhibition, her fellow artist Bruno Munari wrote a commentary in the form of a short dialogue:<\/p>\n
– Mother has left.<\/em><\/p>\n -Left where? She was furious this morning.<\/em><\/p>\n -She left, to look for herself.<\/em><\/p>\n -But where?<\/em><\/p>\n -Inside herself.<\/em><\/p>\n -So she didn\u2019t leave.<\/em><\/p>\n -It\u2019s a saying, sometimes one leaves the other way, in the opposite direction. It means that one isn\u2019t washing dishes anymore, now one is washing paintbrushes.<\/em><\/p>\n -So she is doing art?<\/em><\/p>\n -Art is a woman.<\/em><\/p>\n -Logic is a man.<\/em><\/p>\n -Balance happens when art and logic become one.<\/em><\/p>\n -Mother was about to lose her balance.<\/em><\/p>\n -Now she has rediscovered it.<\/em><\/p>\n By the 1980s and 1990s nobody was interested in feminism. The world had other problems and everyone forgot about artists along the likes of Mariuccia Secol (and most likely many others) and how much her generation did for us. Only recently have they started being rediscovered, though even in the Italian environment not many know the name Secol. Only a few years ago her works were shown in major exhibitions about feminist art, such as The unexpected Subject. 1978 \u2013 Art and Feminist<\/i> in Italy In FM Centre for Contemporary Art in Milan and Cooking Cleaning Caring. Care Work in the Arts since 196<\/i>0 at the Joseph Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop.<\/p>\n I am looking at her beautiful, small and wrinkled hands and I think about the times they must have bled, when during work she stabbed herself with a needle. Mariuccia will go down in the history of art. I\u2019m sure of it.<\/p>\n Monika Branicka<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5],"class_list":["post-7259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bez-kategorii","category-wystawy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7259"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7303,"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7259\/revisions\/7303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galeriamonopol.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}