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Mariuccia Secol: Unraveling
edited by
Monika Branicka and Eva Brioschi
Authors
Monika Branicka, Maria Bremer, Eva Brioschi, Sonia D’Alto, Manuela Gandini, Janis Jefferies, María Inés Plaza Lazo, Mariuccia Secol, Marco Scotini
Description
The monograph is the first comprehensive study of the artist Mariuccia Secol who has been a radical and original figure in Italian art since the late 1950s. A leading feminist and co-founder of the Gruppo Femminista “Immagine” in Varese, she exhibited at the 1978 Venice Biennale—yet her vast body of work has hitherto remained in hidden in radical underground archives.
Born in 1929, Secol began her career as a painter, translating postwar traumas into dense encaustic compositions. Her encounter with feminism in the 1960s catalyzed a profound metamorphosis: abandoning her “quiet brushes,” the artist embraced a “creativity of refusal,” dismantling and re-sewing domestic materials and garments—including her own wedding dress—to denounce oppressive social roles.
Her ouevre has come to span instances of “unraveling” (understood as a gateway to knowledge) as well as monumental textile installations exploring the intersectionality of gender-based violence and global conflicts. Throughout, her practice expresses what Secol has defined as a “mental birth”—an unceasing process of mending and liberation that transforms private experience into a strategy of universal resistance.