SPOLTORE, ITALY.- For Gina Babić, the human body belongs to two very different worlds. In one, it is something to be studied, understood and treated through her work as an orthopedic doctor. In the other, it becomes material for imagination — something that can be reshaped, distorted and freed from the rules of anatomy.
Those two experiences come together in Carni Scelte, Babić’s solo exhibition opening September 4 at Spazio Iris in Spoltore, near Pescara. Curated by Carla Abril Maizon, the exhibition brings ceramics and installations into a conversation about the body, vulnerability and the complicated boundary between professional responsibility and artistic freedom.
Even the title begins with a contradiction. Carni Scelte literally evokes “choice meats,” the kind of phrase that might once have appeared outside a neighborhood butcher shop. It is a deliberately unsettling association for an artist who is vegetarian, works every day with human anatomy and also has what the exhibition describes as an almost affectionate fascination with traditional butcher shops.
Rather than resolving those contradictions, Babić uses them as the starting point for the work.
The body in her practice is not simply something represented from a distance. It is part of her daily professional life: observed, examined and understood structurally. As a doctor, she encounters the body through precision, responsibility and the reality of physical fragility. Art gives her another space in which that same body can exist differently.
In her ceramics and installations, anatomy is no longer fixed. Forms can bend away from recognizable structures, retaining only memories of flesh, bone and organic matter. Fragility exists alongside resistance, while the act of making becomes less about reproducing the body than about allowing it to become something imagined.
That distinction between medicine and art gives Carni Scelte much of its emotional tension. The medical gesture seeks to understand and repair. The artistic gesture can break apart, exaggerate, reconstruct or simply let things remain unresolved.
For Babić, artistic practice also offers a way of processing experiences that cannot necessarily be left behind at the end of a working day. The exhibition describes art as a kind of “exorcism” — a means of accepting, transforming and eventually releasing what her medical profession retains.
Shaping clay and constructing installations therefore become intensely personal acts. If medicine requires intervention in another person’s body, art allows Babić to intervene in her own experience of those encounters.
The result is an exhibition in which the body is simultaneously physical and psychological: something vulnerable enough to require care, but open enough to become metaphor, memory and possibility.
Carni Scelte forms the fourth chapter in the second exhibition cycle at Spazio Iris, an independent space founded by Maura Prosperi in 2025. The program invites artists and curators to develop exhibitions beginning with a single word or concept. After its first six-part cycle explored the idea of the “Natural,” the current series turns toward the universe of dreams.
Within that framework, Babić’s work occupies an intriguing space between what can be clinically observed and what can only be imagined.
Carni Scelte, curated by Carla Abril Maizon, opens at Spazio Iris on September 4, 2026, from 7 to 9 p.m. and remains on view through October 3. The exhibition can be visited by appointment at Via G. Fonzi 38, Spoltore, Italy.
