This is the first exhibition presented under the name Luisa Catucci Contemporary, marking the transition from what was formerly Luisa Catucci Gallery. What once operated as a conventional gallery has deliberately shed that skin.
Luisa Catucci Contemporary now functions as an expanded platform for contemporary art, grounded in exhibitions, anchored in long-term artistic relationships, and opened toward knowledge exchange, shared learning, and community building.
LA VIE EN ROSE
Maike Freess, Barbara Boekelman, Claire Tournay, Mana Urakami
curated by Luisa Catucci in collaboration with Mario Bermel
La Vie En Rose unfolds not as a theme but as a pulse. Pink runs through the exhibition like connective tissue — not decorative, not anecdotal, but insistently present.In art history, pink has never been innocent. Born as a softened red, it once belonged to flesh, vitality, and spiritual embodiment. It appeared in religious painting as a hue of incarnation rather than gender. In the Rococo, it bloomed into excess and pleasure — silk, skin, ornament, desire — a color of power dressed as refinement.
Only later, with the rise of bourgeois norms, industrial production, and consumer culture, was pink disciplined into a symbol of femininity, sweetness, and compliance. A color trained to behave. As a gender was expected to behave. Here, it does not.
Across the works of Maike Freess, Barbara Boekelman, Mana Urakami, and Clara Tournay — spanning painting, drawing, embroidery on photography, and sculpture — pink thickens, stains, interrupts. It holds delicacy without surrender, intimacy without fragility. Strength does not cancel tenderness; it sharpens it.
The title echoes the song made immortal by Édith Piaf, whose life stood far from romantic idealization. Marked by hardship, excess, loss, and relentless survival, Piaf embodied a form of resilience that gives the exhibition its undertone: softness as endurance, beauty as persistence.
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