Individuality and Emancipation through Abstraction: The Experimental Practices of Italian Women Artists from the Late 1940s to the Mid-1960s
A SIS Networking Scheme Talk by Martina Borghi
Date: 7 Oct 2026, 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm BST
Location: Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies – Online and in-person in Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
The emancipation of Italian women artists between the late 1940s and the early 1960s remains a largely underexplored topic within the critical landscape, which still insufficiently acknowledges the distinctive and singular approach through which this theme was articulated. During those years distinct and subjective forms of self-affirmation began to emerge, preceding the explicitly feminist group collaborations that developed after 1965. The analysis of the profiles of the women artists of this early period is an endeavour to outline a communal process of silent, individual self-legitimation, one that unfolded primarily through experimental approaches and was not characterized by a strong shared ideological framework as in the late 1960s. Many of these women artists worked within geometric abstraction and scientifically oriented avant-garde practices, where rigorous mathematical and technological approaches became highly personal forms of subjective freedom.
This research talk proposes a preliminary investigation into the link between abstract artistic forms and proto-feminism, bringing a neglected chapter of female self-expression pursued through artistic practice to light. Its aim is to examine how female artistic emancipation came to assume the form of a genuine systematic and rigorous inquiry, mirroring the semantic and methodological framework that also characterized the artistic production of the period. Within this framework, the talk will analyse the artistic production of women artists – such as Grazia Varisco, Dadamaino, and Giulia Napoleone among others – operating in a context characterized by a strong intermedial and interdisciplinary potential and shaped by the use of abstraction, kinetic and optical practices. Within this perspective, women artists actively engaged with aesthetic investigation transforming it into a form of technological and communicative emancipation. If art operated as a form of research during that period, then research itself came to function as a means for empowerment. This different perspective further enables a more inclusive and comprehensive examination of the avant-garde movements associated with rational aesthetics, which are still rarely approached through interpretative frameworks that emphasize the relationship between methodology, scientific research, rational art, and women artists.
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Booking:
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