Verita Monselles. CARNALE

The Centro Pecci presents Verita Monselles. CARNALE, the first exhibition in an Italian contemporary art center dedicated to the artist and photographer Verita Monselles, whose work explores visual languages connected to female and feminist thought through fashion and the genres of portraiture and the nude.

Verita Monselles (1929, Buenos Aires – 2004, Florence) used photography as a tool for reclaiming both herself and female subjectivity, a means of shedding the stereotyped images of women-as-objects produced by dominant media and advertising culture. Often subtly ironic and metaphorical, Monselles intervenes in and dismantles the symbols of patriarchal and religious tradition.

The artist frequently documented the performances of fellow women artists or involved them directly in her own works (Tomaso Binga and Marion D'Amburgo were the models for her photographic series Ecce Homo), in a spirit of sisterhood and mutual reflection.

Monselles worked as photographer for the Florentine theatre company Il Carrozzone (later Magazzini Criminali) and developed editorial projects for the fashion world, aiming to reinterpret the role of women in contemporary society. Her photographic language reflects these transitions: at times baroque, indebted to theatrical staging and to a period spent living in Naples; at other times pop and alluring; or polished, elegant, and sensual, linked to advertising aesthetics. Monselles portrays a female body that, beyond being political and declarative, also desires: a sensual and sexualized body, unashamed and fully authorial of its own desire.