Martin Holman talk: Ketty La Rocca…

Presentation about Italian art and women

Martin Holman has a special interest in recent Italian art, and has been involved in major exhibitions in the UK and Italy. He will talk about La Rocca’s remarkable ideas and output, and examine the reasons why her contribution was critically neglected for so long. He will examine La Rocca’s remarkable ideas and output, her pioneering work in film and her radical artistic practice and examine the reasons why her contribution was critically neglected for so long.

Including other women artists in Italy during the boom years for progressive art in the 1960s and ’70s, this period saw the rise of new ways of working with materials unprecedented in art. Yet the scene was, as one prominent critic described it, ‘predominantly male and capitalist’ despite the creative activity in numerous genres of many women who struggled for attention from a steadily globalising art market.

‘La Rocca was one of the most distinctive Italian artists of the 70s.’ That is the opinion of one leading Italian critic about the groundbreaking artist, Ketty La Rocca. ‘The interdisciplinary nature of her work,’ the critic went on, ‘places her amid events, typical of the decade, that oscillated between visual poetry, installation and performance.’ In spite of this assessment, La Rocca is only now becoming well known, even in her native Italy, and rated as one of the most important artists in the international feminist avant-garde that emerged in the 1970s.