The 2024 Venice Biennale provided a sprawling, multifaceted stage for global art, but within the historic walls of ACP Palazzo Franchetti, a more concentrated dialogue took place. The exhibition Breasts, curated by Carolina Pasti, sought to map the complex iconology of the breast from the sixteenth century to the present. Among the historical heavyweights and contemporary provocateurs featured in the show, the Italian artist Adelaide Cioni (b. 1976) emerged with a distinct, quietly radical voice. Her contribution, To be naked. Breasts, is a testament to the enduring power of materiality and the urgent need to reclaim the fragmented female form from centuries of voyeurism.
In a cultural landscape where the female body is perpetually contested—simultaneously hyper-sexualised, censored, and legislated against—Cioni’s approach offers a profound shift in perspective. Rather than presenting the body in its entirety, she isolates its parts, stripping them of their traditional context. By focusing solely on the breast, Cioni forces the viewer to confront the signifier directly, dismantling the entrenched visual hierarchies that have long defined contemporary art. Through her unique deployment of textiles and works on paper, she transforms an often-objectified anatomy into a site of feminist agency, structural integrity, and material exploration.
The Materiality of the Body: Wool, Canvas, and Suture
Cioni’s practice is deeply rooted in the tactile, the rhythmic, and the structural. In the primary iteration of To be naked. Breasts (2020), she eschews the traditional mediums of oil paint or bronze, turning instead to wool and canvas. This large-scale work features cut-outs of wool meticulously stitched onto a stark canvas backdrop. The choice of material is not merely an aesthetic preference; it is a conceptual anchor. Textiles carry a heavy historical burden, long relegated to the realm of ‘women’s work’ or domestic craft, operating in the shadow of the so-called ‘high arts’. By elevating wool and stitching to the gallery wall, Cioni participates in a lineage of feminist artists who have weaponised craft to challenge patriarchal art histories.
In Cioni’s hands, the fabric transcends its status as a surface or a medium—it becomes, as the artist has suggested, a body in its own right. The wool, with its fibrous warmth and organic texture, mimics the soft tissue it represents. Yet, it is the stitching that performs the most critical conceptual work. The thick, visible thread acts as a boundary line, simultaneously separating the cut-out form from the void of the canvas and binding it to its substrate. The act of sewing is inherently one of repair, of pulling together disparate edges. In To be naked. Breasts, the suture becomes a metaphor for the fragmented female experience—an attempt to hold the self together in a culture that seeks to dissect it. The meticulous labour required to stitch the heavy wool demands time and physical exertion, embedding the artist’s own bodily presence into the depiction of the breast.
Decontextualising the Erotic: The To be naked Series
The genesis of this work lies in Cioni’s broader series, To be naked, developed between 2020 and 2021. The series is defined by its rigorous isolation of specific anatomical parts—primarily legs and breasts. These are zones of the female body that have historically borne the brunt of the male gaze, heavily laden with erotic and fetishistic associations. When presented as part of a whole, the breast is often consumed within a narrative of seduction, maternity, or vulnerability. However, by severing the breast from the torso, Cioni disrupts this easy consumption.
This process of decontextualisation forces a radical re-reading. The isolated breast becomes an abstract form, a geometric intervention on the canvas. It is stripped of its subservience to the male gaze and presented as an autonomous entity. This strategy of fragmentation has echoes in the surrealist tradition, but whereas the surrealists often fragmented the female body to heighten its uncanny or erotic charge, Cioni fragments it to neutralise the voyeur and empower the subject.
The To be naked series gained significant critical traction when works from the collection were exhibited in the landmark 2021 show Io dico io – I say I at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (GNAM) in Rome. The exhibition, taking its title from the Italian feminist Carla Lonzi, focused on self-representation, female autonomy, and the rejection of imposed identities. Within this context, Cioni’s isolated, stitched body parts functioned as declarations of independence—a refusal to be viewed as a cohesive object of desire, demanding instead to be encountered on their own material terms.
Curatorial Resonance: Breasts at the 2024 Venice Biennale
The inclusion of To be naked. Breasts in the 2024 ACP Palazzo Franchetti exhibition anchored Cioni’s work within a sweeping historical continuum. Curated by Carolina Pasti, the Breasts exhibition was a masterclass in thematic tracing, gathering works from the Renaissance to the digital age to examine how this specific anatomy has been codified and commodified. The curatorial premise acknowledged the breast as an over-determined signifier—a symbol of life-giving maternity, a flashpoint for sexual politics, and a battleground for body image and health.
Placed alongside historical depictions of the Madonna lactans and mid-century pop-art provocations, Cioni’s wool and canvas piece offered a necessary contemporary grounding. Where older works often treated the breast as a symbol belonging to religion or to men, Cioni’s work reclaims it for the woman herself. The tactile nature of the wool invited a visceral reaction, contrasting sharply with the smooth, impenetrable surfaces of classical marble or oil glazes found elsewhere in the Palazzo.
Furthermore, the exhibition highlighted the intersection of aesthetics and socio-political identity. In an era where bodily autonomy remains a central tenet of global feminist discourse, the depiction of the breast can never be a neutral act. Cioni’s To be naked. Breasts resonated deeply with audiences because it refuses to apologise or explain. It simply exists—bold, textured, and undeniable. It asks the viewer to consider what remains when the cultural baggage surrounding the female form is stripped away.
On Paper: Ink, Vinyl, and the Intimacy of Scale
While the monumental textile pieces dominate the gallery space, Cioni has also explored the themes of To be naked through works on paper, specifically utilising Indian ink and vinyl paint on vintage paper (often measuring an intimate 22 x 28 cm). This shift in medium and scale dramatically alters the viewer’s relationship with the image. The large wool works require the viewer to step back, to take in the physical weight and architectural boundary of the stitching. The works on paper, conversely, demand proximity.
The use of vintage paper introduces an element of time and history to the work. The paper, slightly yellowed and carrying its own material memory, serves as a delicate, skin-like surface. When Cioni applies the stark, unforgiving black of Indian ink or the synthetic flatness of vinyl paint, she creates a striking visual tension. The breast is rendered with graphic immediacy, yet it sits upon a fragile, aged substrate.
This iteration of To be naked. Breasts speaks to the vulnerability inherent in the naked form. Without the heavy, protective barrier of stitched wool, the ink drawings feel raw and immediate. They capture the essence of the isolated body part with an almost calligraphic fluidity, proving that Cioni’s conceptual rigor translates seamlessly across mediums. Whether working with the slow, deliberate pace of the needle or the swift, irreversible mark of the brush, her investigation into the geometry and politics of the female form remains unyielding.
The Broader Implications for the Visual Arts
Adelaide Cioni’s practice represents a crucial node in the ongoing evolution of the visual arts. Her ability to merge rigorous conceptual frameworks with an intense dedication to materiality sets her apart in an era often dominated by digital ephemera and post-internet aesthetics. By returning to the physical—to wool, to canvas, to ink, to vintage paper—she insists on the undeniable reality of the body.
To be naked. Breasts is more than a study of anatomy; it is an investigation into the boundaries of the self. It challenges the art historical canon, dismantles the voyeuristic gaze, and elevates the materials of domesticity to the realm of high conceptual art. The work demands that we look at the female form not as a repository for external desires, but as a site of inherent power and structural complexity.
As the discourse surrounding bodily autonomy continues to intensify globally, artists like Cioni provide the necessary visual vocabulary to navigate these complexities. Her work does not preach; it presents. It takes the fragmented, scrutinized female body and sews it back together, not into a shape designed to please, but into a form that simply, defiantly, is. Adelaide Cioni has successfully reclaimed the breast from the weight of history, offering it back to the viewer as a form of unvarnished truth—a testament to femininity unbound, rooted in the tactile reality of the present.