Giosetta Fioroni (Italian/Rome, b. 1932) was born into a family of artists in Rome. Influenced by her parents and mentors, like Toti Scialoja, Fioroni developed a bold style early on that stayed with her for her entire career. After finishing her studies with Scialoja at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, Fioroni became the only woman to join the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, a group of artists with whom she developed a distinctly Italian Pop Art aesthetic. In 1963, Fioroni began to work with images projected onto canvases. Using metal-based paints, Fioroni mimicked the silvery effects of Italian and French cinema. By fostering this unique style within the influential Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, Fioroni quickly became one of the most important Italian Pop artists of the 1960s and ‘70s.
Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, Fioroni was given numerous exhibitions at La Tartaruga, the center of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo group, both in group and solo shows. Fioroni participated in important exhibitions at galleries and institutions around Europe, including the Nuove tendenze in Italia at Galleria del Naviglio in Milan (1966), and Vitalita del negative nell’arte italiana 1960/70 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (1970-71). A retrospective of Fioroni’s art was held at the Centro Attivita Visive del Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara in 1972. Fioroni also participated in the Venice Biennale in 1956 and 1964, and had her own room at the Venice Biennale in 1993.
Fioroni has experimented with a diverse range of mediums throughout her artistic career, including drawing, bookmaking, painting, performance, sculpture, ceramics, and recently, photography. Through all of her chosen media, Giosetta Fioroni’s art challenges what it means to look at and be looked at by women. In La Spia Ottica, her famous performance piece from 1968, Fioroni constructed a room in which an actress “lived” for the duration of the piece, punching a small hole in the wall for viewers to watch the performance. La Spia Ottica was restaged at Frieze New York in 2017 and stands as a testament to the relevance of her art.
In 2014, Fioroni collaborated with the Italian photographer Marco Delogu and posed as multiple “alter egos” for a series titled L’Altra Ego (2014). Her portraits are also about looking. Using metallic paint on plain grounds, Fioroni draws the viewer’s attention to the gazes of her “sitters”, which are often images of women taken from film and advertisements. Overall, by combining the vocabularies of pop art and 1960s and early ‘70s feminism, Fioroni’s art makes a political statement about looking and being looked at.
Giosetta Fioroni currently lives and works in Rome.