An inner look: A study on Ketty La Rocca's artistic journey until her illness considered the ultimate possibility of expression

Abstract

In the last phase of her short existence, Ketty La Rocca (1938-1976), who is included among the most important Italian conceptual artists of the last century and among the greatest exponents of visual and real poetry of the ’60s and ’70s, fought against cancer. In these years in which the poetic struggle is accompanied by the fight for life, the artist can be seen in the fullness of her avant-garde, intermedial research, based on the rethinking of the relationship between body, image, language, identity, and otherness. The disease will be put at the service of her condemnation of a limiting, alienating, distorted, and ineffective communication: the artist will use the x-rays of her own skull attacked by the terminal pathology, which she’ll superimpose on the negatives of photographs of her own hands on which she will write her famous reminder: “you”. The analysis of this last, crucial moment will consider La Rocca’s entire path, to which it is related with lucid coherence.