At Museo Novecento, the first Italian retrospective dedicated to Helen Chadwick (Croydon, 1953 – London, 1996), Life Pleasures presents a complex and layered vision of the body and the feminine. Curated by Sergio Risaliti, Stefania Rispoli and Laura Smith, the exhibition traces the artist’s production, foregrounding the balance between experimentation and concept. From the outset, the vaulted ceilings adorned with floral compositions reveal the avant-garde spirit of a twentieth-century woman conceiving identity as an event. Contributions from Kunsthaus Graz, the Victoria and Albert Museum and The Hepworth Wakefield Gallery transform the corporeal and cultural matter on display into an intense experience. Light bulbs, flowers and Corinthian columns weave narrative threads with elusive substances; like a rebus, the solution emerges only when observed from a decentered perspective. The gaze moves across the surface of the image and opens onto a subterranean territory inhabited by symbols and elements coexisting within a field devoid of hierarchies.
Helen Chadwick, “Life Pleasures”, 2025, installation view, ph. Elisa Norcini, courtesy Museo Novecento, Firenze
The series In the Kitchen offers an emblematic example: Chadwick inserts her own body into objects belonging to the domestic sphere – the washing machine, the stovetop, the pantry -transforming nudity from erotic display into a reflection on the traditional imaginary and converting it into a structure that contains, constrains and defines. The light-dark chromatic contrast, together with the use of photography and the selected objects, gives rise to works of radical economy. The artist’s physical presence, natural and devoid of theatricality, remains distinct from the inanimate objects that surround her, while the image itself undermines an external, objectifying viewpoint. Unexpectedly, Life Pleasures proposes a reading of Chadwick’s work that resists univocal ideology, thus withdrawing it from interpretations centered on the uncanny, the provocative or the extreme. Chadwick’s originality lies in her capacity to render the abstract manifest through a precise synergy of concept, medium, subject and representation. Devices, tools, mechanisms and organs stand alongside one another, overlap or interlock, each preserving its own identity while generating a dissonant unity.
Helen Chadwick, “Life Pleasures”, 2025, installation view, ph. Elisa Norcini, courtesy Museo Novecento, Firenze
From the transformative space of the kitchen, a trajectory unfolds that moves inward. The implicit meaning in the vermilion rooms reveals itself through multiple backlit cavities, beacons and thresholds of passage. This luminous exposure of the invisible finds one of its most vibrant formulations in Nostalgie de la Boue. The Cibachrome slides, mounted on plywood structures and traversed by a visible electrical apparatus, produce a refined, hypnotic effect. Life and death, organic matter and the human envelope, are arranged according to a symmetry that both unsettles and welcomes. Within this imbalance, coexistence becomes arcane and revelatory, as what teems and what is inert dwell within the same interval of light. This work, like all of Helen Chadwick’s art, invites the viewer to linger without defenses, allowing meaning to emerge through an unexpected flow.
Helen Chadwick, “Life Pleasures”, 2025, installation view, ph. Elisa Norcini, courtesy Museo Novecento, Firenze
In her static-performative works, those same recesses return inverted, taking the form of vertical sculptures and containers of bodily echoes, akin to upturned caves. Elsewhere, Chadwick engages in an archaeology of the past through subtraction – a mode of tradition that allows myths to surface in order to map a cosmos articulated in the feminine, where history and essence drift together. The environment shifts, and a celestial vault is symbolically overturned onto the terrestrial surface, collapsing the distance of a fluid galaxy inhabited by feminine forms suspended between costume and image. From this perspective, the controversial works One Flesh and Allegory of Misrule articulate a subtle tension between order and disorder, the sacred and the profane. Allegory here moves away from the assertion of fixed meaning and instead stages a slippage. Once again, Chadwick displaces the point of view, compelling the mind to renegotiate what it believes it recognizes.
Helen Chadwick, “Life Pleasures”, 2025, installation view, ph. Elisa Norcini, courtesy Museo Novecento, Firenze
The ritual extension of the slides finds a powerful echo in Chadwick’s self-portrait posed as a model in the artist’s studio, installed within an internal aedicule of Museo Novecento. This curatorial choice engages with the historic architecture and memory of the building, positioning the portrait as an object of secular devotion, suspended between memento, irony and artistic ceremony. In Life Pleasures, Helen Chadwick’s practice moves from the surface toward an inner territory, where states of discontinuity emerge. A formal logic governs their arrangement: a structural calm compels the gaze to remain within the terrain prepared by the artist, along rigorous conceptual coordinates. Within this delicate balance, it is the perceptual density of the images that renders thought lucid and tangible.
Info:
Helen Chadwick. Life Pleasures
25/11/2025 – 01/03/2026
Museo Novecento
Piazza Santa Maria Novella 10, Firenze
www.museonovecento.it
Chantal Gisi is a writer and translator, holding a Master’s degree in Modern European and American Languages and Literatures from Florence. For Juliet, she explores the connections between art, literature, and history, with a keen awareness of the present.
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