Helen Chadwick at Museo Novecento

A retrospective dedicated to one of the most radical artists of the 20th century, from November 25 to March 1

Museo Novecento presents Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures, the first major exhibition in Italy dedicated to one of the most radical and influential British artists of the late twentieth century. Curated by Sergio Risaliti, Stefania Rispoli, and Laura Smith, the show is organised in collaboration with The Hepworth Wakefield and Kunsthaus Graz, where it will travel after Florence. The exhibition opens symbolically on 25 November, marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

The first retrospective of this scale in more than twenty-five years, the exhibition traces the entire career of Helen Chadwick (1953–1996), from early works such as In the Kitchen (1977) to her celebrated sculptural series Piss Flowers (1991–92), highlighting the deeply experimental and unconventional nature of her practice.

Engaging all the senses—sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste—Chadwick created works designed to evoke a wide emotional spectrum: wonder and delight, desire and tenderness, but also revulsion and disgust. To achieve these effects, she employed an array of heterogeneous materials, often unusual or grotesque, combining extraordinary technical skill with an unceasing curiosity for the limits of artistic media. Her work moved fluidly across sculpture, installation, photography, printmaking, and performance, constantly redefining the very idea of the artwork.

A committed feminist—playful, unruly and sumptuous—Chadwick explored the notion of “experience” to confront questions related to feminism, sexuality, illness, and beauty, pushing beyond what is traditionally considered “acceptable” or “beautiful.” Her works abound with natural elements and everyday materials: orchids, bluebells, buttercups, dandelions, daffodils, tulips, roses, daisies, and honeysuckle, but also chocolate, fur, hair, bubble bath, milk, oysters, meat, motor oil, decaying vegetables, earthworms, urine, and cells—often alongside her own body, a recurring subject in her explorations.

From her university years onward, Chadwick established herself as a key figure within postwar British contemporary art. In 1987, she became one of the first women nominated for the Turner Prize. From the late 1980s, she taught in several of London’s most prestigious art schools, profoundly influencing a new generation of artists—the Young British Artists—including Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, and Damien Hirst. Her impact on the British art scene—as both artist and educator—was significant, and her legacy remains tangible today.

Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures

Chadwick is remembered for her formal richness, mastery of materials, technological sensitivity, and remarkable ability to merge experimentation with artistic discipline. The retrospective at Museo Novecento seeks to reaffirm the contemporary relevance of her work, emphasising her capacity to confront still-urgent feminist issues and to transform material culture with a gaze that is at once curious, ironic, and surprising.

The exhibition opens with the Lofos Nymfon cycle (1992–93), in which the artist interweaves personal memory, myth, and maternal symbolism. Inspired by her mother, Aggeliki Chadwick, born in Athens, the series marks a symbolic return to the artist’s Hellenic roots. Through oval forms and archetypal symbols—the egg, the uterus, the belly, the navel—Chadwick constructs an intimate dialogue between mother and daughter, body and myth. The images alternate gestures of care and mutual support against the backdrop of sacred sites such as the Parthenon and Mount Lycabettus, evoking an ancestral longing for union, protection, and rebirth.

In The Oval Court (1984–86), female bodies merge with baroque forms in a visual orgy of pleasure and regeneration. Twelve images of Chadwick appear to swim through a fantastical world of flora and fauna. The work becomes an intense and evocative exercise in self-representation: a joyous and uninhibited celebration of the artist’s union with nature. Created using Xerox photocopying—a medium the artist valued for its immediacy and efficiency—the work intertwines numerous references to Rococo and Baroque architecture and to art history. Chadwick’s poses draw inspiration from masterpieces such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52), Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s La chemise soulevée (c. 1770), and François Boucher’s Blonde Odalisque (1752).

One of Chadwick’s earliest works, In the Kitchen (1977), was originally conceived as a performance featuring wearable sculptures that resembled household appliances—a refrigerator, an oven, a washing machine, and more. These “costumes,” halfway between garments and furniture, were built with metal frameworks covered in soft white PVC. During the performance, Chadwick and several classmates wore the pieces while singing, speaking, and moving to a soundtrack assembled from daytime radio programs aimed at female audiences. By symbolically fusing the female body with kitchen appliances, the artist drew attention to stereotypes of domesticity. The structures restricted the performers’ movements, forcing mechanical or involuntary gestures, while the appliances themselves took on anthropomorphic and sensual forms: stove burners evoking breasts, and the washing machine’s porthole suggesting a pregnant belly.

Helen Chadwick

The exhibition also includes the Wreaths to Pleasure series, circular photographs depicting compositions of flowers, petals, and buds suspended in various liquids—from tomato juice to milk, dish soap, and chocolate. The fluidity of the substances contrasts with the stillness of the arrangements, producing images that are vivid and unsettling. The circular frames recall biological and cellular forms, evoking the building blocks of life. While “wreaths” evokes mourning and death, Chadwick also described these pieces as bad blooms to highlight their vital yet corrupted sensuality.

In Piss Flowers (1991–92), among her most iconic works, Chadwick experimented with her own urine and that of her partner David Notarius, using it to shape plaster forms later cast in bronze. The warmth of female urine produces the central phallic form, while the cooler male urine shapes the surrounding petals. Through this playful inversion of sexual roles, Piss Flowers reflects on the ambiguity of gender and the impossibility of reducing it to a single fixed identity.

Balancing irony and unease, Helen Chadwick fused art, science, and philosophy, anticipating themes that resonate strongly today: gender identity, corporeality, ecology, and sensuality as a force that is both creative and destructive. Nearly thirty years after her death, Life Pleasures reaffirms her importance on the international stage and her decisive contribution to redefining the relationship between body, image, and visual language.