FB

Included in the collateral events of the 10th Florence Biennale 2015, the exhibition "Per Desdemona" features a solo show by Franca Pisani. The exhibition, which opens on Monday 19 October at 12 noon, is set up in the spaces of the Palazzo di Giustizia in Florence - which is hosting an art exhibition for the first time - and will remain open until Saturday 24 October, with opening times from Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 7.15 p.m. and on Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2.30 p.m.

Sponsored by the Florence Civil Chamber, the exhibition in the new Palace of Justice - a significant venue - which is organised by the Florence Biennale on the theme of violence against women. It is a timely exhibition because it is aimed at raising the awareness of both public opinion and ‘insiders’ on the topic–gender violence, in which the Florence Civil Chamber is on the front line.

‘The initiative,’ says the lawyer Carlo Poli, President of the Civil Chamber of Florence, ’was immediately endorsed by the Presidency of the Court of Appeal, by the Magistrate Dr. Paola Belsito, by the lawyer Rosa Anna Lepore, administrator of the Saulo Sirigatti Trust, by the Director of the Department of Health Science of the University of Florence Prof. Pierangelo Geppetti and by the Coordinator of the Psychology and Psychiatry Section of the Department of Health Science, Prof. Cristina Stefanile. This is part of a broader project, already in progress for the past two years, to combat violence, which envisages the creation of a listening and first assistance desk for victims of abuse which is located in the Palace of Justice’.

The Exhibition

The exhibition consists of 28 works - including nine canvases measuring 150 × 100 cm on a single theme.  - documenting a work in which the artist has created an imaginative world of ‘contemporary women’, interpreted by a symbolic self-portrait that takes on the guise of an acrobat, a tragic mask and the movements of an acrobat or perhaps a modern dancer. These works are made with natural pigments, transferred directly onto the canvas, thus creating a pictorial weft that is interwoven with the warp of the signs that make up the figures and the surrounding space, to create a unique visual language. The faces of this symbolic woman deliberately portray as a mask that would like to represent both a mannequin, and therefore an object devoid of life, and a woman's face quivering with life, but transposed onto an abstract plane, a dreamlike dimension that leads us to the borders of reality.

Franca Pisani's woman-symbol is always accompanied, work after work, by a small phrase that suggests more complex keys to interpretation. The first writings appeared on the artist's paintings to recall the event at the Centre Pompidou Paris in 1978, at which the magazine Album Operozio was presented. In them, there is also a reference to invigorating encounters with some protagonists of ‘Visual Poetry’ such as Eugenio Miccini, bearing witness to a long creative journey and a profitable and constant enrichment experienced in Florence and its province, thanks to a heritage of artistic presences that is still not fully exploited today.

The Artist

A protagonist of group and solo exhibitions since 1977, Franca Pisani has exhibited in various cities in Italy and abroad. 2014 and 2015 were important years for her: after her solo exhibition at the Hamburgher Bahnhof in Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, she was invited to participate with one of her works in the group exhibition 'Dietrofront' at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. One of her works is now in the collection of self-portraits in the Vasari Corridor of the Uffizi. He has exhibited at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, in the rooms of Palazzo Collicola Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, at Palazzo Pisani in Lonigo (Vicenza). Lastly, at Expo Milano 2015, in the Pavilion of the Principality of Monaco, which will be followed by a personal exhibition in Monte Carlo announced from 6 to 16 November 2015.