Libera Mazzoleni

Libera Mazzoleni (b. 1949, Milan, Italy) attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where she graduated in 1970. From 1968 to 1973, she produced coloured polyester sculptures with undulating profiles, conceived in opposition to the hierarchical static nature of the monumental forms of Minimal Art, which were exhibited in numerous group shows at the Galleria San Fedele and Parco Sempione (1971) in Milan, at the Grand Salon Ricards in Paris and the Malta Society of Art in 1972.

In 1973, introduced by Pierre Restany, she held her first solo exhibition at the Palazzo dell’Arengario in Milan. The following year, she produced the artist’s book Linee Complessi Essere. In 1977, she was invited by Romana Loda to take part in the Magma exhibition at the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, and in the same year, she exhibited in Florence in the exhibition Il volto sinistro dell’arte, again curated by Loda, the series Luca, II – 49: sixteen photographs in which the words of a verse of Luke’s Gospel are erased and juxtaposed with different images, creating unexpected meanings each time, revealing the ‘exclusionary and misogynistic’ character of the text. Mazzoleni, at the time, also developed her research in the field of performance in Afanisi (Galleria Centrosei, Bari, 1977) and Narciso contro Narciso (Galleria Comunale di Arte Moderna, Ancona, 1979).