LONDON.- Newly opened Dover Street art gallery Partners & Mucciaccia announces the first UK solo exhibition of Giosetta Fioroni, the 85 year old doyenne of Italian Pop Art.

Giosetta Fioroni: Silver Years features the artist’s acclaimed silver works from the 1960s painted with enamel, aluminium and oil paint, alongside rarely shown coloured canvases, widely considered amongst the most important contributions to Italian Pop Art.

Regarded as ‘The First Lady of Italian Pop Art’ by Alberto Boatto (Il Giornale dell’Arte, Nov 2013), Fioroni was one of the most prominent female members of the renowned Roman art movement La Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, together with Mario Schifano, Tano Testa and Franco Angeli. Fioroni was also one of the protagonist artists of the Venice Biennale 1964: The Rise of Pop Art.

Working against a backdrop of ‘La Dolce Vita’ and the new wave of post war Italian neo realism, Fioroni’s early production was heavily influenced by the wave of creativity that pervaded streets, cafes, and cultural circles of “a proliferating, sometime absurd” capital city of the 1960s. Many of her muses can also be found in the work of Antonioni, Pasolini, Fellini, and Bertolucci.

Fioroni’s elegant works have the immediacy of a photographic snapshot, where often on the same canvas she depicts either the trace of a sequence of images, or the same subject is present simultaneously, but at two different times. It is strikingly notable how Fioroni's groundbreaking vision during this period reflects her relationship with the fashion and photography industry.

American Pop Art took on a new meaning in post-fascist Italy, and the European movement embraced the cool detachment of the Americans but absolutely rejected the mechanical techniques they employed.

The artist offers an alternative to the pervasive view of Pop Art as instantiating a male dominating gaze and passive female subject. Her work is a reflection on the female narrative and not a reproduction of a stylised image.

Italian Pop Art is currently enjoying a resurgence, a fact reinforced by the number of exhibitions recently hosted in galleries and museums worldwide. Auction houses are also registering attention worldwide and have started to witness an increase in Fioroni’s sale prices since the latter half of 2015. In fact, world record prices have been reached each time, with Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips over the last year.

Fioroni alone has recently had exhibitions at the Macro in Rome (2012); The Drawing Center in New York (2013); GNAM in Rome (2014). In addition, a historical-biographical monograph, curated by Germano Celant, was published in 2009 (Skira). In 2015, the Centre Pompidou in Paris bought one of her silver paintings of the sixties - Gli Occhiali, (The Glasses) for their permanent collection. The London exhibition follows a successful solo exhibition at Galleria Mucciaccia in Rome and her solo show Giosetta Fioroni. Roma anni ’60 at the Museum MACRA in Catanzaro, Italy in 2016.