Persisting Matters: An Artist Talk Series – Beatrice Scaccia in conversation with Giorgio Di Domenico

Please join us for the second in a series of encounters and conversations with contemporary artists, this time with Beatrice Scaccia and Giorgio Di Domenico.

Persisting Matters is a series of talks that places contemporary artists in conversation with scholars, curators, critics, and the public. The series is developed in the context of CIMA’s 2023-2024 exhibition, Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli, 1938-1948, and supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Cagli saw his artistic practice as a tool for anti-rhetorical resistance and critique to power in times of exile, displacement and trauma. Questions of gender, racism, political oppression and resilience through art and community practices were central to his work in the years of his exile from Italy, due to the country’s racial laws. Persisting Matters engages contemporary artists, whose practices explore these pressing subjects in their individual context and prism.

Bea Scaccia (b.1978, Veroli, Italy) earned her BA and MFA at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome where she studied with the late Italian artist Gino Marotta.  In her paintings, she reworks the elements that collectively give rise to illusions of beauty and constructions of appearance, compressing them on the canvas as surreal, uncanny marks of affectation. Investigating the cultural links between feminine splendor and monstrosity, she builds pictorial compositions that can be read as true parodies of bon ton.

A trained realist painter, Scaccia’s method is more spontaneous rather than it is planned.  She uses recurring visual tropes such as faux fur, jewels, wigs, cloth to signify darker psychological themes pertaining to female beauty. Pearls and hair clips become infestations; what was seen as well-ordered in the sensual hairdos of the Baroque and Rococo periods becomes unavoidably disturbing. The result is an over-the-top composition exemplifying an existential struggle to be contained.

Since 2011 Scaccia has been based in New York City, and has exhibited in various galleries and institutions both locally and worldwide including Katonah Museum of Art, New York, Galleria Ugo Ferranti, Rome, Galleria Nazionale, Rome, Magazzino Italian Art, NY, and the American University’s Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C., among others. Her work is found in collections including the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation and the Portland Museum of Art.

Giorgio Di Domenico is a PhD student in Art History at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and a former research fellow of the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York. His research focuses on the reception of Surrealism in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. He interned at La Galleria Nazionale in Rome and the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and was a visiting graduate student at New York University Casa Italiana. Giorgio published papers on Jannis Kounellis, Diego Marcon, and Alberto Burri, and he is one of the contributing authors to the forthcoming Robert Rauschenberg catalogue raisonné. He writes regularly on contemporary art in magazines including “Antinomie,” “NERO,” and “Flash Art.”