Breasts, at Palazzo Franchetti, is the Venetian exhibition that talks about the breast in some of its most interesting nuances: motherhood, inclusion and sexuality, but also illness, for a discussion poised between intimacy and politics.
The Hidden Paintings Grandma Improved, In Deepth Oil on canvas 200 x 175 x 3.5 cm 78 3/4 x 68 7/8 x 1 3/8 in 2023 Laure Prouvost; Courtesy Lisson Gallery
From 18 April to 24 November 2024, the mezzanine of Palazzo Franchetti (ACP Palazzo Franchetti) will be tinged with bright pink, opening its doors to a mission as delicate as it is essential: promoting awareness of breast cancer through the channel, increasingly influential, of art.
The curator, Carolina Pasti, takes the opportunity for a historical-artistic analysis of how the breast has been understood and represented over the centuries through various media, from painting to sculpture, from photography to cinema, presenting works by more than thirty artists, emerging and established.
The exhibition, divided into five rooms, is accessible through the corridor designed by Buchanan Studio: the site-specific work Booby Trap. It is a long, dark pink passage, on whose ceiling breast-shaped lights are installed, which introduce us to the themes covered in the exhibition. This tunnel invites us, with an almost dreamlike walk, to access the first room, which, through the works on display, reveals the narrative constructions that, from the sixteenth century to today, have surrounded the breast.
Among the works presented we find Untitled 1 #205 by Cindy Sherman, part of the History Portraits series, in which the artist takes on the role of female protagonists of famous Renaissance paintings. Here, Sherman takes on the appearance of Raphael's famous Fornarina, thus entering into dialogue with another of the works in the room: the delightful Madonna of Humility by Bernardino del Signoraccio, a Renaissance, intimate and precious representation of the Virgin caught in the act of breastfeeding the child.
Prune Nourry, Œil Nourricier #6. Glass and bronze 15 × 20 × 20 cm — 6 × 7 3/4 × 7 3/4 in. Unique work in a series of 8 + 2 AP 2021. Courtesy of the artist and TEMPLON, Paris – Brussels – New York. Laurent Edeline
The journey then continues in the second room, where the impact that the breast, as a shape and as a symbol, has had on sculptural production is analysed. Standing out here is Prière de Toucher (1947) by Marcel Duchamp, a work in foam rubber on black velvet, but Charlotte Colbert's ceramics and Prune Nourry's glass sculpture also catch the eye. It is, therefore, a space that explores the tactility of the breast, its consistency, but also its abstraction and its reconfiguration in new and surprising forms.
The third room, then, is dedicated to photography: to the sensuality that we find in Irving Penn's campaigns, to the symmetry sought by Mapplethorpe, but also to the tenderness and humanity that Philippe Garner tries to capture in the most intimate and physiological details, such as drops of sweat beading the subject's breasts.
A series of works that fragment and deconstruct this organ can then be found in the following room. For Laure Prouvost, for example, "the isolation of the breast is not painful but empowering" and so in her In Deepth, it becomes a disembodied form, disconnected from all the functions and connotations of tradition.
Allen Jones, Cover Story 2/4 composition with leather accessories and brass support cm. 186 x 60 x 45 2021. Courtesy of the artist
Finally, the exhibition concludes with the cinematic journey of Four for See Beauties (2022), a short film by Laure Prouvost. Here, in a dark and pink space, a welcoming place that seems to huddle around us like a soft womb, we find ourselves immersed in a story of maternal love and images of marine life: an epic of the charm and tenderness of nature.
The artists on display: Nobuyoshi Araki, Louise Bourgeois, Christopher Bucklow, Adelaide Cioni, Charlotte Colbert, Teniqua Crawford, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Bernardino del Signoraccio, Marcel Duchamp, Richard Dupont, Giovanna Ferrero Ventimiglia, Hans Feurer, Philippe Garner, Paa Joe, Allen Jones, Sherrie Levine, Robert Mapplethorpe, Prume Nourry, Lakin Ogunbanwo, Laura Panno, Aurora Pellizzi, Irving Penn, Laure Prouvost, Issa Salliander, Cindy Sherman, Jacques Sonck, Masami Teraoka, Oliviero Toscani, Anna Weyant, Chloe Wise .