Curator: Valentín Roma
Opening: Friday 7th April, 7 pm
Free guided tours: Tuesday at 6 pm (starting on 11 April)

Ketty La Rocca (La Spezia, 1938 – Florence, 1976) may have had only a brief career yet her work remains a paradigmatic example of the way some of the more striking experimental practices of the 60s and 70s were pursued in Europe. A pioneer in the field of visual poetry and a member of the legendary Gruppo 70, she produced pieces that explore performance, collage and video art. This exhibition is the first solo show to bring together her entire oeuvre in Spain.

Pioneer in the territory of visual poetry and member of the mythical Gruppo 70, Ketty La Rocca (La Spezia, 1938 – Florence, 1976) brought together in the course of her career those lines of confrontation that started in the Italian neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and were to culminate during the following decade.

The denunciation of bourgeois ideology, the rejection of the neo-realist aesthetic and the determination to do away with the mythifications of popular culture constitute a background to her work. Furthermore, the way she broke free of the restraints of meaning, the linguistic and syntactic turmoil, and the juxtaposing of languages and images all bear witness to a practice based on the search for new alphabets for art.

Ketty La Rocca’s works eliminate the sentimentalism inherent in the rhetoric of self. On the contrary, in keeping with the approaches of critical communication theory, they make use of anti-narrative techniques such as collage and nonsense.

Her early pieces question the female stereotypes derived from advertising and the mass media, by alternating feminist denunciation with parody of patriarchal institutions. Whether through video, performance, photography or writing, her projects reconsider the body as a vehicle of expression, distancing it from identity paradigms and turning it into a “grammatical machine”.

The deconstruction method advocated by semiotics, and more specifically the influential essays of Umberto Eco that shifted the paradigms of interpretation, acquire a unique prominence in Ketty La Rocca’s work.

Le mie parole is the first retrospective exhibition that takes a general overview of her career to be held in the Spanish State.