“Women must always remember who they are and what they are capable of. They must not be afraid of the darkness that engulfs things, because that darkness frees a multitude of treasures. That darkness that they, free, disheveled and proud, know as no man will ever know. ” (Virginia Woolf)

In the month dedicated to the celebration of “International Women’s Day”, Galleria360 organizes an exhibition entitled “Arte Donna”, which offers to visitors interesting artistic narratives entirely female through a collective contemporary art exhibition.

The exhibition will be inaugurated on Friday 4th March 2022 at 7.30 pm in via Borgo Ognissanti 77r, Florence. During the vernissage Jazz musicians will play live. According to the decree law of 7th January 2022, n. 1, access to the gallery is allowed only to visitors in possession of the super green pass covid-19.

Camille Claudel was an artist, an extraordinary sculptress in the original sense of the term “out of the ordinary”, whose talent was overshadowed for years by the stormy love affair with Auguste Rodin, her teacher and lover. Camille Claudel’s artistic life was short and intense like that of a butterfly: born in France in 1864 from a wealthy family, from a very young age she demonstrated her passion for art, especially for sculpture. Her mother does not support her artistic inclination, but Camille, thanks to her paternal support, begins modeling at the age of six and receives her first sculpture lessons at thirteen. Her teacher is immediately convinced of her talent. The young woman grew up and moved to Paris to study art at the Colarossi Academy, where she met Auguste Rodin, her teacher in a sculpture course. She begins a passionate and tumultuous relationship with him, who was twenty-four years older than her and was already committed to another woman. Camille becomes his assistant, muse, model and lover: their souls, their thoughts, their artistic works merge and become contaminated. The love and passion that unites them, however, is the same that separates them, fading after more than ten years of clandestine relationship in a den of grudges, obsessions of plagiarism and jealousies. Camille Claudel was a woman who lived her role as an artist intensely, consuming herself in a perennial struggle against the prejudices of society, the envy and difficulties of competing in an environment dominated by men. She faced the conventions of an era that still identified the role of women in the wife and mother and where every sign of independence was paid dearly. At the age of forty-nine Camille was a single and independent woman, able to support herself thanks to the fruit of her artistic work. A shame too great for her family who, immediately after the death of her father, her only supporter, forced her to be interned in a psychiatric hospital. This concludes the artistic parable of an original and very talented sculptor, whose perennial struggle against conformism and the hypocritical rules of decorum and social and artistic convenience were classified as a behavioral discomfort, a psychic disturbance. Camille Claudel’s is just one of the many stories that tell us about complex issues such as female emancipation and gender stereotypes.

So with the “Arte Donna” exhibition, Galleria360 wants to pay homage to the entire female universe by celebrating its social and artistic redemption. The art director Angela Fagu has selected female artists from all over the world by signing an installation that allows you to compare different artistic addresses, placing a magnifying glass on the female gender, on its kaleidoscopic nature, as well as on its way of relating with history, personal and collective.