“The Great Mother” is an exhibition about women’s power: not just the life-giving creative power of mothers, but above all, the power denied to women and the power won by women over the course of the twentieth century. From the representation of motherhood, the exhibition moves out to trace a history of women’s empowerment, chronicling gender struggles, sexual politics, and clashes between tradition and emancipation.
Conceived as a temporary museum that blends art history with visual culture, the exhibition reconstructs a story that spans the twentieth century, exploring female icons and clichés of femininity, and developing a complex reflection on woman as an active participant in representation, no longer just a passive subject of it.
The show opens with a presentation of the archive of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, who throughout her life, starting in the Thirties, gathered thousands of images of female idols, mothers, matrons, Venuses and prehistoric deities into a vast iconographic collection that was used by Carl Gustav Jung, Erich Neumann and many other psychologists and anthropologists researching the archetype of the great mother and the matriarchal cultures of prehistory.
A major section of the exhibition focuses on women in the early avant-garde movements, specifically, in Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. Showing the work of women artists alongside the male artists who have dominated the histories of these movements, it highlights both contradictory and complementary attitudes that defined modernity while analyzing the radical transformations of gender roles that accompanied the profound economic and societal changes of the early twentieth century.
The exhibition The Great Mother is accompanied by a catalogue edited by Massimiliano Gioni, to be published in two languages, Italian and English, by Skira Editore. The volume brings together more than three hundred color images, illustrating monographic texts and indepth information on all the artists in the exhibition and a collection of new essays and criticism, written specifically for the occasion by Marco Belpoliti, Barbara Casavecchia, Whitney Chadwick, Massimiliano Gioni, Ruth Hemus, Raffaella Perna, Lucia Re, Pietro Rigolo, Adrien Sina, Guido Tintori, Calvin Tomkins, and Lea Vergine.
The graphic design for the exhibition and publishing products is by Goto Design, New York.
August 26 – November 15, 2015
The Great Mother
curated by Massimiliano Gioni
promoted by Comune di Milano | Cultura
Conceived and produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi
in partnership with Palazzo Reale
for ExpoinCittà 2015
with the support of BNL Gruppo BNP Paribas
Palazzo Reale
piazza Duomo 12, Milano