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This is an overview of the work of Giosetta Fioroni, who has been a leading Italian artist since she began working in the 1960s.

This is an overview of the work of Giosetta Fioroni, who has been a leading Italian artist since she began working in the 1960s.
Edited by Gloria Bianchino, the book presents the complete series of her works – drawings, paintings and sculptures – donated by the artist to the CSAC, the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione at Parma University: fragments of personal memories, and images collected from the media, childhood memories and within families.
Giosetta Fioroni portrays life, her own and ours. Her works bring us back to the fairy-tale world of infancy; they restore – through a long thread of daily images – shreds of private and collective memory from the 1950s onwards.
Giosetta has her tools and tells her story to the world; she follows the strands of personal reflection on memory, expressed through a unique feminine expressivity; she speaks to us with the intensity of young adolescent girls, narrates the imaginary world of fables, and plays with the magic power of words. She chooses to consider her own life as testimony to her being; she comes forward as the dialoguer, and the colours of her canvasses are the magic of her being.

Giosetta Fioroni was born in Rome in 1932 in a family of artists: Mario, her father, is a sculptor and Francesca her mother paints and is a skilled puppeteer. One of her first exhibitions was at the 1956 Biennale of Venice. Since that time she has held numerous personal and group shows both in Italy and overseas. Between 1960 and 1970 she produced a series of canvasses with silver images that immediately caught the attention of the public.
In 1968 Giosetta distanced herself momentarily from painting and created a piece of performance art, La Spia ottica, which inaugurated the Teatro delle Mostre at the Galleria Tartaruga in Rome. In 1969 she also created the first Teatrino, “toy for adults” in painted wood: through a lens the viewer can see, within, an assemblage of miniature objects.
Throughout the 1970s Giosetta, together with the writer Goffredo Parise, lived long periods in the countryside around Treviso. Her focus at that time was on the legends of the spirits of the countryside, oneiric and visionary stories; this experience led to a series of works dedicated to the world of fables and the rediscovery of infancy.
In the 1980s she executed the painting cycle Il vero and this exhibition displays a few of the canvasses belonging to this work. A series of pastel works and oils dedicated to Gian Domenico Tiepolo are also from this period.

In addition to pursuing painting – which Giosetta continues to do in her large laboratory-studio in Via San Francesco di Sales in Trastevere – the artist was drawn to ceramics in 1993 and began working at the Gatti Workshop in Faenza; this activity kept her increasingly busy in the creation of significant sculpture cycles. From when she began working creatively, Giosetta has maintained constant ties with writers and poets, including Parise, Ceronetti, Arbasino, Zanzotto, Garboli and many others, with whom she collaborated in the production of books, graphics and works on paper.

Parma, Salone delle Scuderie in Pilotta
6 March – 18 April 2004

 

The official catalogue is available at the Skira bookstore in via Torino 61 in Milan and from April 2004 in all Italian bookstores.