Giosetta Fioroni was born in Rome in 1932. Born to a family of artists – her father was a renowned sculptor and her mother a skilled painter and professional puppeteer – Fioroni was almost destined to become an important figure of mid-20th century art. Inspired and supported by her entourage, she enrolled at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts, where she met Toti Scialoja – an influential figure in her career.
Her generation was quick to establish collectives and international networks. She was one of the few female members of the Scuola Romana (which included Franco Angeli, Mario Schifano, Tano Festa, Francesco Lo Savio, Fabio Mauri and Giuseppe Uncini), a group that emerged on Rome’s artistic scene during the 1960s. The collective mainly centred around Galleria La Tartaruga, a meeting point that would house many of their creations. At a time when New York was a more popular destination, she travelled to and worked in Paris regularly, with one period of intensive activity between 1958 and 1963. Her extended network allowed her to cross paths with the likes of Cy Twombly, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg, and to frequent the studio of Tristan Tzara, among others.
Thematically, Fioroni has explored the female figure from various angles and through a variety of mediums. Her most popular painting cycles from the 1960s and 1970s included argenti or ‘slides of feelings’, which captured popular cultural or commercial imagery through the use of aluminium and silver enamel. In spite of her success, the artist, driven by creative experimentation, broke off her cycle to stage an ambitious performance entitled La Spia Ottica. From that point onwards, her art became more interactive, as she sought to address the audience in both direct and indirect ways. Fioroni regularly drew on well-known fairy tales and legends to find common ground with which to interact. With an emphasis on timeless textual sources there arose collaborations with writers and poets, such as Parise, Ceronetti, Abrasino, Zanzotto and Garboli, which led to paper-based and book-like creations – the subject of a retrospective of their own at Rome’s National Institute for Graphic Design in 1990. With this chapter now behind her, Fioroni would branch out into ceramics, cinema and sculpture.
Fioroni has had her work exhibited all around the world in a variety of mediums. Her first solo show took place in 1957 at the Galleria Montenapoleone in Milan. Galleria La Tartaruga played host to numerous shows throughout the 1960s and 1970s. During that period, she also took part in landmark group exhibitions such as Nuove Tendenze in Italia at Galleria del Naviglio, Milan, (1966) and Vitalità del negativo nell’arte italiana 1960/70 at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. Other important solo exhibitions took place at Galerie Breteau, Paris (1963), Galleria del Naviglio, Milan (1965, 1967, 1969 and 1971), the Modern Art Agency Gallery, Naples (1968), Galleria Il Punto, Turin (1970) and Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna (1974). In 1972, a retrospective was installed at the Centre for Visual Activities at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. Fioroni took part in the Venice Biennale in 1956, 1964 and 1993. In March 2003, the city of Rome organised an extensive retrospective at the Museo dei Mercati di Traiano entitled La Beltà, opere dal 1963 al 2003. Another comprehensive retrospective was organised in March 2004 by the Centre for Contemporary Art in Parma. 2013 marked her first ever solo show in North America at The Drawing Center in New York: Giosetta Fioroni: L’Argento, which would be repeated at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. In May 2017 she was invited to take part in a programme of frieze projects at Frieze New York. In 2021 she was the subject of a double exhibition at the Cannaviello Gallery in Milan: one dedicated to her work from the 1960s and 1970s, and another on more recent artistic developments.
Fioroni lives and works in Rome.
