Giosetta Fioroni

A leading female protagonist in post-War Italian art, Giosetta Fioroni was born in Rome in 1932 into a family of artists – her father Mario was a sculptor, her mother was a painter. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome where she was a pupil of artist and poet Toti Scialoja. She then spent a period in Paris (between 1958 and 1962) and exhibited at the 7th Quadrennial of Rome in 1955, and the following year at the 28th Venice Biennale. Whilst in Rome, Fioroni was part of the artistic milieu associated with the Galleria la Tartaruga, owned by Plinio De Martins, where she had the opportunity to meet Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. Fioroni was also associated with the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, together with Tano Festa, Mario Schifano and Franco Angeli, with whom she exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 1964 (the Biennale of Pop Art), invited by Maurizio Calvesi. From that year, she became the permanent companion of Goffredo Parise, and remained his companion until 1986, the year of the Venetian writer's death.

In a solo exhibition with Umberto Bignardi, held at the Tartaruga in 1961, Fioroni began to exhibit paintings made using industrial aluminium lacquered paint, bearing signs, lettering and symbols as she gradually moved away from abstraction towards figuration. From 1963 Fioroni worked with photographs projected onto canvas and in 1967 at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan she exhibited a series of female portraits and other iconic figures drawn from the history of art using white backgrounds. She also worked extensively with images of fashion models, creating portraits of glamorous women which she rendered in graphite pencil on a white surface with an iconic detachment reminiscent of American Pop Art of the period.

After 1969 Fioroni turned to the investigation of the world of fable and legend: paintings, boxes and miniature theatres open to a world of personal and collective memory. The 1980s were characterised by collaborations with writers and poets and then in 1990 the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica in Rome organised an anthology show of her works on paper. At the Venice Biennale of 1993 Fioroni enjoyed a solo presentation; in the same year she began working with ceramics.