Italia Bernardi

Galleria Il Ponte presents an exhibition dedicated to Rosa Foschi, film-maker, photographer, poet and painter. After studying the classics and art, she attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and made various animated drawing shorts (housed in the Bologna film archives), produced by E. Gagliardo’s “Corona cinematografica”. Three of these, made between the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, are presented in the gallery: Amour du cinéma (1969), Ma femme (1970) and Amore e Psiche (1971).

Subsequently, she concentrated on painting and in particular photography. On display here is a particular series of Polaroids, made between the mid-1980s and 1990s, centred on an original vision of the still life genre.

As Paolo Barbaro writes: “It is clear that the sphere of reference of Rosa Foschi’s photography is Dada, but [in] these collections of everyday objects attached to behaviours and thoughts … one can perceive the rigour with which these images are organized, the control behind the layouts (the uniform light, like in an object-symbol or a polaroid, is just one of the rhetorical forms active in these images) and also some elements of photographic iconography, the use of mirrors conceptually alludes to duplication,… the free play between the genres of still life and portrait, here enriched by reflections between iconology and alchemic investigation of the Roman post-conceptual area, between Calvesi, Fagiolo and of course Luca Patella.”