LONDON.- This autumn, the Estorick Collection presents the first UK museum exhibition dedicated to Ketty La Rocca (1938–1976), a trailblazing figure in Italian conceptual and feminist art. Though her career was cut short by her untimely death at the age of 38, La Rocca’s work has left a lasting impact, and this landmark exhibition brings her bold, thought-provoking vision to a wider audience.
Featuring over 50 rarely seen works from the artist’s Estate, led by her son Michelangelo Vasta, the show traces La Rocca’s artistic evolution – from her early critical engagement with mass media and experiments with visual poetry to her celebrated Riduzioni (Reductions). In these powerful pieces, she transformed photographic imagery through language and mark-making, fragmenting and deconstructing the image to explore identity, communication and the body.
A founding member of the avant-garde collective Gruppo 70, La Rocca merged art with poesia visiva (visual poetry), confronting the limitations of patriarchal language structures and advocating for alternative forms of expression. Her practice often centred on the human hand – an expressive tool for both gesture and communication – and expanded into striking sculptural works, including large-scale alphabetic forms in black PVC.
La Rocca’s work has garnered growing international acclaim in recent years; it has been featured in major exhibitions including the Venice Biennale and can be found in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Centre Pompidou and the Uffizi. Resonant and urgent, La Rocca’s work feels remarkably contemporary – interrogating consumer culture and gender dynamics with clarity and force.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of talks and workshops, as well as a fully illustrated publication featuring newly commissioned essays.
Ketty La Rocca (La Spezia, 1938 – Florence, 1976) was a prominent figure in the Italian neo-avant-garde. After moving to Florence in 1956 she began working with Gruppo 70, creating collages that explored the relationship between media images and language, with a particular focus on women’s issues. During the early 1970s, she turned to the language of gestures, addressing anthropological themes through diverse media such as photography, video, performance and body art. Her invitation to the 1972 Venice Biennale brought her significant national and international attention, and a posthumous retrospective was held at the same event in 1978. Today, her work belongs to the collections of major museums including MART (Rovereto), MAXXI (Rome) and the Museo Novecento in Florence. In recent years, La Rocca has also been represented in key exhibitions on art and feminism, such as Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (MOCA, Los Angeles, 2007) and Woman: Feminist Avant-Garde in the 70s (National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome, 2010).
