*** Welcome to piglix ***

Ketty La Rocca


Ketty La Rocca (14 July 1938, in La Spezia – 7 February 1976, in Firenze) was an Italian artist during the 1960s and 70s. She was a leading exponent of body art and visual poetry movements.

Nowadays, The Estate Ketty La Rocca is managed by her son, Michelangelo Vasta, Professor of Economic History at the Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Siena.

The art of La Rocca comprises visual poetry, visual art, and performance. She explored language, images, and scenes of the everyday world. She emphasized the imagery of bodies.

Beginning in the 1970s she mounted an extensive study of the human hand. She examined their potential for expression. She combined hands and words. She desired to create a different language, a more visceral communion in which the physical body, gestures and the written word were intertwined. In connection with these works La Rocca made specific reference to the female life experience, which had only ascribed certain activities to women’s hands. In 1974, she wrote from a feminist perspective: “For women today is not a time of explanations. They have a lot to do and then they only have one language at their disposal, which is alien and inimical to them. They are robbed of everything, except of the things that no one notices and those are manifold, even if they must be arranged. Hands, for instance, too slow for female skills, too poor and too incapable of continuing to hoard. It is better to embroider with words...“

Near the end of her career La Rocca worked in "Riduzioni" (reductions), in which she transforms a common photograph, such as a family or individual portrait, into something more graphic. She alters the picture using graphic contouring of the image or by other distortions, often involving written words.

La Rocca debuted in the early 1960s as a poet, and eventually combined her poetic sense with the visual sense. Beside the experience with concrete poetry, she produced, in line with the visual poetry of Gruppo 70, to which she belonged, her collages, a set of images and words taken from newspapers and magazines and recombined in critical forms.

Starting from the late 1960s and early 1970s, she examined the universe of communication, using innovations including videotapes, installation and performance. During this time she created several works in black PVC plastic, often reproducing single letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks (mainly the comma), and various objects in metal and mirror.


...
Wikipedia

...