about.

STUDIO STEFANIA MISCETTI presents BLUE a new work by American artist NANCY SPERO (Cleveland, 1926) created specifically for the gallery space, after previous exhibitions of 1991 and 1996.

Co-founder in 1972 of the group AIR-Artists in Residence, first gallery in New York run by women only, Spero belongs to the first generation of American women artists with close links to the feminist movement. Her research has always been directed towards the construction of a new subjectivity, believing, as she declared many times that “Yet my intervention is not neutral, history is not fixed, itʼs mutable, open to interpretation, it keeps on living by accumulating new meaning. Now, this is a very subversive idea, because it means history can be changed, power relations reversed by our choosing to remember what some may feel is best forgotten. But that is the prerogative of the artist.”

For a long time underestimated and relegated in the feminist debate, Speroʼs work is only recently been recognized within international spheres with major retrospectives (Center Georges Pompidou Paris, MACBA Barcelona, Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid, Seville CAAC, MOMA, Whitney Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York) and the brilliant participation in 2007 to the 53rd Edition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Robert Storr, with a work titled Maypole: Take No Prisoners. From Maypoleʼs cycle derives also BLUE, the main installation for this latest exhibition for Studio Miscetti.

Spero for this exhibition, using the technique of handmade printing realized directly on the walls of galleries and museums already experienced since 1988 (Jewish Museum of New York, Residenz galerie of Salzburg Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Wien of Vienna) updates the ancient Sumerian myth of Marduk and Tiamat, the primordial aggression toward the female from which the creation of heaven derives: figure of women appear on the walls of the gallery, imprinted words along the perimeter beams, a suspended sculpture. Complement of the exhibition are a series of works on paper, made from 1985 to 2006 with the use of printing and collage with engraved zinc plates.

“It is the same mechanism that produces patriarchy and war. At the root of it all there is the power guaranteed by brutality, by abuse. This is what Nancy Spero seems to be saying with her most recent work. Virginia Woolfʼs claim that war is a manʼs business springs to mind,and it is always going to be with us until space is given to the “other traditions” of the feminine world. The awareness that this is still a distant goal does not blunt Nancy Speroʼs desire and strength to speak. Perhaps for the first time, however, this desire wears a veil of sadness, as is suggested by the title given to this work: Blue.”

Cristiana Perrella in Nancy Spero, Charta Editions, 2009

Read and download the exhibition’s press release.

works.

here below some images from NANCY SPERO’s blue.