On 12 May 2026, inside the lobby of Rome’s MAXXI – the national museum of twenty-first-century art – five dancers emerged wearing costumes built around single geometric shapes: a point, a line, a square, a triangle, a circle. Original music by composer Dom Bouffard filled the space. The performers moved, multiplied, and interacted with the fabrics Adelaide Cioni had designed, transforming the gallery into a living, breathing drawing. The piece, Five Geometric Songs (2025), was presented twice – at 6 p.m. and again at 7.30 – as part of Tragicomica, a sweeping group exhibition surveying Italian art from the mid-twentieth century to the present, curated by Andrea Bellini and Francesco Stocchi. It runs until 20 September 2026.
“Drawing a pattern is like singing a song,” Cioni has said. That single line of artist’s testimony encapsulates everything about a practice that has, over the past decade, quietly become one of the most distinctive voices in European contemporary art – one that threads together drawing, textile, performance, and an unflinching feminist viewpoint without ever resorting to polemic or spectacle.
The Translator Who Quit Literature
Adelaide Cioni was born in Bologna in 1976 and studied drawing at UCLA in Los Angeles before completing a BA in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. She holds an MA in contemporary history and a master’s degree in Literary Translation. For a decade, she translated American literature – John Cheever, Lydia Davis, David Foster Wallace – and it was only in 2012, having finished her translation of Cheever’s journals, that she abandoned literary work to pursue art full time.
That biographical detail matters more than it might appear. Translation is an act of moving meaning between systems without losing its force; Cioni’s art does precisely the same thing. A stripe, a triangle, a circle – the elementary grammar of visual form – migrates across medium after medium: ink on paper, wool stitched into canvas, costumes on moving bodies, sound rippling through a museum lobby. The constant is not the material but the rhythm, the pattern, the visible beat. As the MAXXI described it, “repetition becomes the generative principle shared equally by decoration and music.”
She is represented by P420 in Bologna and The Approach in London, and her work is held in the collections of the Voorlinden Museum in Wassenaar, the Centro Pecci in Prato, and the A.R.M. Holding Art Collection in Dubai.
To Be Naked: The Body as Visual Language
The work that first brought Cioni international attention – and which continues to reverberate – is To Be Naked. Breasts, a 2021 drawing in Indian ink and vinyl paint on vintage paper, measuring just 22 by 28 centimeters. Small in physical scale, enormous in cultural reach. The piece belongs to a broader series in which Cioni isolates parts of the human body – arms, breasts, the figure on a tray – and renders them through her characteristic economy of line, stripping away narrative to leave the body as pure visual rhythm.
In 2024, To Be Naked. Breasts was selected by curator Carolina Pasti for Breasts, a major group exhibition at ACP Palazzo Franchetti during the Venice Biennale’s sixtieth edition. The show gathered more than thirty artists – from Marcel Duchamp to Cindy Sherman, Louise Bourgeois to Charlotte Colbert – spanning painting, sculpture, photography, and film from the 1500s to the present. Cioni’s contribution held its own in formidable company precisely because of its restraint: where other works in the exhibition dealt with breasts as sites of illness, eroticism, or political charge, Cioni’s drawing reduced the form to a line and its echo, inviting the viewer to see the body not as an object to be consumed but as a pattern to be read.
The Venice showing catalysed a wider discourse about how contemporary women artists negotiate the representation of the female body – not through shock or provocation, but through the discipline of form. Amy Dempsey, in her 2026 book The Female Body in Art (Laurence King), traces this lineage from the Renaissance Madonna del Latte to present-day practice, noting that “the female body has been depicted time and time again, and why its portrayal has often delivered important messages about – and to – the world.” Cioni’s work sits squarely in that conversation.
Five Geometric Songs: Pattern as Universal Language
If To Be Naked. Breasts demonstrated Cioni’s power on paper, Five Geometric Songs proved that her visual language scales – literally – into full-body immersion. The performance originated at Arte Fiera in Bologna in February 2025, curated by Bruna Roccasalva for Fondazione Furla, and was restaged at MAXXI in May 2026. Five performers – Vera Borghini, Typhaine Delaup, Valentina Foschi, Giovanfrancesco Giannini, and Daniela Malusardi – animate costumes and structures conceived by the artist, each built around a single geometric shape.
As MAXXI’s event description states, “the starting point is simple: a pattern is a visible rhythm.” What holds the piece together is repetition – the same logic that constructs a visual motif and a musical composition. Bouffard’s score amplifies what the bodies and shapes already express, creating what critics have described as a synaesthetic environment in which sound takes form and drawing extends beyond the surface.
Cioni’s practice increasingly collaborates with musicians and dancers, but this is not the interdisciplinary novelty of an artist chasing trends. The connection to music has structural roots: she sees pattern as a universal language, a system capable of traversing drawing, music, the body, and space simultaneously. In her own words, the work “explores the point where drawing becomes sound, and sound becomes image.” The bodies are not illustrating; they are drawing.
A Practice Built on Absence
Cioni’s stated artistic constants – drawing, an absence of narration, and a feminist viewpoint – sound like a manifesto, but her work refuses the propagandistic. There are no slogans, no overt political statements, no didactic wall texts demanding that viewers think a particular way. Instead, the feminism is structural: it lives in the refusal to narrativise the female body, in the insistence that a breast or an arm is as worthy of formal investigation as a landscape or a grid.
This approach aligns her with a broader movement among Italian women artists who have, over the past decade, reclaimed the vocabulary of abstraction and decorative art – long dismissed as “merely” feminine – as a serious intellectual territory. Her textile works, in which wool is stitched into canvas to create surfaces that pulse with colour and geometry, recall the Bauhaus weaving workshop as much as they do Arte Povera. The material emphasis on tactility – fabric, softness, the possibility of folding and carrying – keeps the work anchored to the body even at its most abstract.
As The Approach’s biography observes, “her works are not symbolic, instead employing the rhythmic quality of mark making, akin to birdsong or music, to create a visual cadence.” That cadence is what separates Cioni from the flood of body-positivity art that has proliferated on social media. Her feminism is not a hashtag; it is an methodology.
What Comes Next
Cioni’s 2026 calendar is formidable. Beyond the MAXXI performance, she is included in Tragicomica – one of the year’s most anticipated Italian group shows – and has been awarded a residency at Amant in New York. Previous solo exhibitions at The Approach (London, 2024) and P420 (Bologna, 2024) consolidated her international profile, while group shows at the China Millennium Monument Contemporary Art Museum in Beijing, the Triennale Milano, and the eighteenth Art Quadriennale at Palazzo Esposizioni Roma have positioned her as one of the most in-demand Italian artists of her generation.
The thread that connects every stage of this career – from Cheever translation to MAXXI stage – is the conviction that the simplest visual units (a dot, a line, a curve) carry the same weight as the most complex figurative composition. Cioni does not celebrate the female body by inflating it or politicising it. She draws it, stitches it, stages it, and lets the pattern speak.
In a cultural moment saturated with declarations about body positivity, Adelaide Cioni’s work offers something rarer and more enduring: proof that the most radical act is not what you say about the body, but how you see it.
Five Geometric Songs was performed at MAXXI, Rome, on 12 May 2026. Tragicomica: Perspectives on Italian Art from the Mid-Twentieth Century to Today runs until 20 September 2026. For details, visit maxxi.art.
