Maria Alicata holds a PhD in contemporary art history. Her research focuses on artistic practices from 1945 to present day, with a special interest in Italian postwar art, primarily on issues related to intermediality, the archive as an artistic practice, and the history of exhibitions. She is a lecturer in Contemporary art at Sapienza University of Rome and the School of Specialization in Historical-Artistic Heritage. She recently co-curated the solo exhibition Maria Lai, Woven Writings, at the Es Baluard Museum in Palma di Maiorca, and Cosmic Garden by artists Madhvi Parekh and Manu Parekh at the 60.Venice Biennale. Recent publications include Archivio Ugo Ferranti. Roma 1974-1985 (Quodlibet, Rome, 2022); Olivetti ispira i giovani. Le ragioni della mostra Arte Programmata. Arte cinetica, opere moltiplicate, opera aperta, Milano 1962 (2023); Francesca Alinovi and the First International Performance Art Week, Bologna 1977 (2023); Suzanne Santoro and the censorship Per una espressione nuova (2024).
Abstract
Marcia Hafif (Pomona 1929-2018), lived and worked in Rome between 1961 and 1969 before returning to the United States, where she had begun exploring a new approach to abstraction. Even after settling in New York, the connections and travelling to Rome will remain a constant for her professional and personal network. Starting from the exhibition at d’Alessandro Ferranti Gallery in June 1975, the contribution will focus on Hafif’s practice of that time though a transnational perspective. In that occasion the artist exhibited for the first time in Italy works from the Mass Tone series resulting from her recent researches on painting and space. At d’Alessandro’s suggestion, she decided to show monochromes on canvas in different formats, some executed in Rome, along with a series of drawings and watercolors. Hafif’s investigation on painting becomes a paradigm, a rigorous working method aimed at rediscovering the essence of things: a response to the crisis of the medium and her person. A young woman and painter, as she used to define herself, daughter, wife, mother and artist, Italian-American, not of origin but of adoption. Through the analysis of original documents from the artist’s archive and that of the Gallery, the paper aims to re-frame her research in the broader Roman context of the Seventies where art, feminism and political commitment intertwined in personal and professional relationships with personalities such as Carla Accardi and Marisa Volpi. In so doing, it considers what is the specificity of her work; how it inscribes itself within her practice and how this might square with Hafif’s relationship to feminism?
Image: View of Marcia Hafif’s solo exhibition, Roma, Galleria d’Alessandro Ferranti, giugno 1975. Centro Archivi MAXXI Arte, Comodato Archivio Ugo Ferranti, FER/FOT/I/7 – photo Mimmo Capone
