The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art inaugurates the Antonietta Raphaël exhibition. Through the mirror, curated by Giorgia Calò and Alessandra Troncone and promoted in collaboration with the Lithuanian Institute of Culture and the Lithuanian Embassy in Rome.

“This exhibition returns the fragments of a very articulated corpus of works and of an intense, full, industrious and devoted life to art. It tells of an artist who told the truth, in an Olympic way, an animal without illusions, with ferocity and with determination, the one she spent in the struggles of her nightmares (always defined as dreams) and the one she lavished on shaping matter, which lasts like that of stone

and rosewood or soft like clay or color paste on the canvas ”Cristiana Collu, Director of the National Gallery.

The figure of Antonietta Raphaël (Kaunas 1895 - Rome 1975), the Lithuanian-born artist and leading exponent of the Roman School, is told through paintings, sculptures and works on paper, accompanied by documents, family photographs, letters and pages of her diaries. The exhibition is completed by a selection of works by Mario Mafai - a lifelong companion - together with an unpublished documentary video made for the exhibition.

Through the mirror it alludes to Raphaël's attitude to transform artistic practice into an instrument of investigation into one's own inner world, and evokes dreamlike and imaginative dimensions in which the female figure is the protagonist. The mirror, understood as self-representation, doubling, threshold to cross, thus becomes the leitmotif of a path that explores the artist's rich production, with a series of thematic nuclei identified by the curators.