MASP

Drawing on research about transgressive actions in the field of art, Carla Zaccagnini makes reference to an episode when The Rokeby Venus by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) – a highly celebrated painting in the Western art canon – was slashed seven times with a butcher’s knife. The act was performed in 1914 by Mary Richardson, a British suffragette who was part of a group responsible for a number of radical interventions in favor of women’s right to vote. Amongst the many strategies used to bring awareness to their cause, the suffragettes vandalized famous artworks, mainly paintings by male artists representing female nudes or men in positions of power. The incisions made by the knife were concentrated on the image of the naked chest of the Roman goddess of beauty, which repeatedly served as the iconographic basis for an idealized and sexualized representation of the female body throughout the history of painting. Taking inspiration from this episode, Zaccagnini produced a contemporary restaging of Richardson’s act using a white sheet of paper the same size as Velázquez’s work, and reproducing the original cuts made on the painting, which has since been restored. By returning to the cuts, the artist is reflecting on the permanence of this gesture today, in line with what Richardson herself said: that the cuts she made represented “hieroglyphs for future generations”, that is, historical symbols that still reverberate gender inequalities in the history of art – a wound that is still open.

— Danilo Cavalcante, curatorship intern, 2023

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