Pietà, 1974

Ketty La Rocca’s artistic research developed entirely within the double incubators of verbal and visual language. Her earliest works, visual poetry, emerged in relationship to her involvement in Gruppo 70. These were freely laid out collages, composed of advertising images and writings cut out from newspapers and magazines. The themes are those that were shared by Gruppo 70: characterised by a mordant critique of consumer society – with particular attention to the representation of women – in a dramatic confrontation with the shocking photographic realism of the reportage from Vietnam or the poorest areas of the world. [...]