What is one of the earliest subjects in art – as well one of the most censored? The breast. First carved onto small “Venus” figurines some 25,000 years ago as totems of fertility, they have since been rendered, revered, fetishised and hidden in turn. At the 60th Venice Biennale, a collateral exhibition at ACP Palazzo Franchetti decided to lay the matter bare – literally.
“Breasts,” curated by the independent curator Carolina Pasti, ran from 18 April to 24 November 2024 in the Renaissance palace on the Grand Canal, timed to coincide with the Biennale’s main exhibition, Adriano Pedrosa’s “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere.” Where Pedrosa’s curatorial framework foregrounded displacement and diaspora, Pasti’s show pivoted to a different axis of identity politics: the body itself, and specifically the anatomical feature that has functioned as cultural signifier across five centuries of image-making.
A Collateral Event With Central Ambitions
The Venice Biennale’s official programme in 2024 comprised 331 artists across the Giardini and Arsenale, with 87 national participations and 30 collateral events. “Breasts” fell into the latter category – shows mounted by external institutions that run parallel to, but independently of, the Biennale’s central exhibition. Collateral status can be a double-edged sword: it grants access to the Biennale’s global audience without guaranteeing the same curatorial weight as the official programme. Pasti’s exhibition leveraged the distinction to its advantage, offering something the main show did not – a focused, thematic deep-dive into a single motif.
The exhibition brought together more than thirty emerging and established artists from across the world, spanning painting, sculpture, photography and film from the 1500s to the present day. Works ranged from Bernardino del Signoraccio’s early sixteenth-century Madonna dell’Umiltà to Cindy Sherman’s hyperreal silicone self-portrait draped in prosthetic breasts, from Marcel Duchamp’s 1947 modified readymade Prière de Toucher – a foam rubber breast mounted on velvet – to Charlotte Colbert’s haunting plaster Mastectomy Mameria (2019). The跨度 was deliberate: Pasti wanted visitors to see how Renaissance iconography of the Madonna lactans reverberates through contemporary practice, and how artists across centuries have intervened in, subverted, or reclaimed the imagery that surrounded them.
Five Rooms, Five Arguments
The show occupied the mezzanine floor of Palazzo Franchetti, divided into five rooms against the building’s art deco interiors. An immersive entrance passageway, designed by Buchanan Studio and titled “Booby Trap,” set the tone – draped in vivid pink fabric with 35 anatomical light fixtures suspended overhead, it evoked both the clinical environment of breast cancer screening and the theatricality of a fashion installation.
Room one examined the historical representation of the breast and the construction of narratives around the female body, with Renaissance masters establishing visual vocabularies that modern and contemporary artists have since interrogated. The juxtaposition of Del Signoraccio’s Madonna with Sherman’s Untitled 205 (1989) – a riff on Raphael’s La Fornarina in which the artist displays a pregnant torso rendered in grotesque, exaggerated detail – demonstrated how the old masters’ idealisation continues to shape expectations.
The second room turned to sculpture, exploring the breast as three-dimensional form. Here, Louise Bourgeois’s The Reticent Child (2005) sat in dialogue with Allen Jones’s provocative Cover Story (2015), a composition of leather accessories and brass that pushed into the territory of fetish and objectification. Room three moved through photography and commercial imagery, while room four addressed illness, mastectomy and the body under medical intervention. Colbert’s Mastectomy Mameria was central here – a cast of a post-surgical torso that refused to aestheticise or sentimentalise the experience of breast cancer.
The final room collected video works and contemporary painting, including pieces by Chloe Wise, Anna Weyant and Lakin Ogunbanwo, artists whose work engages with the gaze, desire, and the politics of representation in distinctly millennial registers.
The Art Historical Thread
What distinguished “Breasts” from a simple celebration of body positivity was its insistence on art-historical rigour. Pasti, who served as Director and Curator of the Schulhof Collection in New York before becoming an independent curator, anchored the exhibition in primary sources. The Madonna lactans – the nursing Virgin – was not merely a theological image but a visual technology that shaped how European cultures understood motherhood, sexuality and the female body for centuries. By placing contemporary works in direct conversation with this tradition, the exhibition argued that current debates about body image, censorship and the male gaze are not new phenomena but the latest chapter in a very old story.
“It goes back to cave paintings – we’ve always been fascinated with the human form, and particularly the female form, which has this incredible allure and mystery,” the artist Teniqua Crawford told CNN in April 2024. Crawford’s Fragment Horizon (2024), an oil and charcoal on linen work included in the show, presented the human figure as landscape, connecting embodiment to the natural world. “Artists keep going back to it.”
The exhibition’s historical sweep also included Giorgio de Chirico’s Nudo di donna (1930), drawn from the artist’s metaphysical period; Irving Penn’s fashion photography; Nobuyoshi Araki’s intimate portraiture; and Robert Mapplethorpe’s disciplined studies of the body. The inclusion of Sherrie Levine, known for her appropriation strategies, raised additional questions about authorship and originality – whose gaze is being reclaimed when an artist restages an existing image of the female form?
Breast Cancer, Pink Politics and the Limits of Awareness
“Breasts” was staged, in part, to promote breast cancer awareness, and marked a partnership with the medical research non-profit Fondazione IEO-MONZINO, which received a portion of the exhibition’s catalog sales. The pink staging – the fabric, the lighting, the suggestively shaped chocolate bonbons offered at the opening night – aligned the show with the visual language of breast cancer advocacy, a colour palette that has been both celebrated for raising awareness and criticised for sanitising a disease.
The tension is worth noting. The “pinkwashing” critique, articulated by scholars such as Samantha King in Pink Ribbons, Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (2006), argues that the commodification of breast cancer awareness through pink branding can obscure the structural and environmental causes of the disease while generating corporate goodwill. Pasti’s exhibition did not entirely escape this critique, but its art-historical framing offered more complexity than a typical awareness campaign. Colbert’s mastectomy sculpture, for instance, refused the narrative of triumphant survival, presenting instead the body as altered, marked and unresolved.
Adelaide Cioni and the Question of Nakedness
Among the exhibition’s most discussed contributions was Adelaide Cioni’s To Be Naked series. Cioni, a Roman artist whose work spans ink, paint and textile, exhibited To be naked. Breasts (2021), a small-scale work in Indian ink and vinyl paint on vintage paper, alongside a larger 2024 piece, To be naked. Hand, rendered in Bellandi wool stitched on canvas. The系列 interrogated the distinction between nudity and nakedness – a distinction with a long philosophical pedigree, from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) to Lynda Nead’s The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (1992). To be naked is to be without clothes; to be nude is to be made into an image. Cioni’s work hovered between the two states, asking what it means to depict the body stripped of both garments and the conventions of artistic representation.
A Global Conversation in a Venetian Palace
The exhibition’s timing – running concurrently with the 60th Venice Biennale – placed it within a broader cultural moment. The Biennale’s main exhibition, curated by the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, was the first to be led by a curator based in the Southern Hemisphere, and it foregrounded indigenous, diasporic and queer artists. “Foreigners Everywhere” asked who gets to belong, who is marginalised, and how art can articulate the experience of displacement. “Breasts” operated in a parallel register, asking how the female body itself has been displaced – from its own owner – through centuries of objectification and regulation.
The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, is the oldest international art exhibition of its kind. Its collateral events have historically served as spaces for experiments that the main programme is too cautious to attempt. “Breasts” fulfilled that function precisely, using the Biennale’s global platform to stage a conversation that was simultaneously art-historical, political and personal. In a city where the female form has been rendered on palace ceilings and church domes for centuries, the exhibition asked who gets to decide how that form is seen – and who gets to profit from it.
The Afterlife of an Exhibition
“Breasts” closed on 24 November 2024, the same day as the main Biennale exhibition. Its legacy will depend less on individual critical reception than on whether it shifts how curators and institutions approach the female body as a subject – not as a universal signifier but as a site of specific, contested meanings. The exhibition demonstrated that the breast is never just a breast: it is a Renaissance theological argument, a commodity, a medical diagnosis, a political symbol, and, for the artists in the show, a starting point for interrogating the权力 structures that have governed its representation.
In the weeks after the exhibition closed, its catalog – available through Amazon Italy – continued to sell, with proceeds supporting Fondazione IEO-MONZINO’s cancer research. The pink “Booby Trap” installation by Buchanan Studio, which had drawn visitors through the exhibition’s entrance, was dismantled. The Palazzo Franchetti returned to its permanent collection. But the questions the show raised – about censorship, about the male gaze, about the distance between art-historical tradition and lived experience – remain as unresolved as they were on opening night.
In a world where the female body continues to be regulated, scrutinised and commodified, an exhibition that simply showed it – in all its historical complexity, its vulnerability and its defiance – was itself a provocation. That it took place in Venice, a city built on spectacle and tourism, only sharpened the edge.
