Fontana launched the "Archivio Rizzari" last year. The retrospective, currently touring Basel and New York, is simply titled "Soft Steel."
By 1964, she had taken over a defunct hardware store in Brera. She called it "Il Sogno del Fabbro" (The Blacksmith’s Dream). It wasn't a gallery in the traditional sense; it was a laboratory. She rejected the white cube. Instead, she displayed kinetic sculptures hanging next to live chickens and welded steel beds covered in raw silk. liliana rizzari
She retreated to a farmhouse in Le Marche. For forty years, she vanished. The art world moved on to Memphis Milano and postmodernism, forgetting the woman who had paved the way for the gritty, industrial chic that would later be co-opted by luxury brands. In 2019, a young curator named Elisa Fontana stumbled upon a storage unit in Ancona. Inside were 300 pieces of unrecognized ephemera: letters from Manzoni, sketches for furniture that defied gravity, and photographs of a woman with severe black bangs and a welding mask standing over a furnace. Fontana launched the "Archivio Rizzari" last year
Her manifesto, penned in 1967 (and largely ignored by the male-dominated press of the time), stated: "Velvet is weak if it does not bleed against rust. Glass is arrogant if it does not hold dirt." It wasn't a gallery in the traditional sense;
She is the patron saint of the tactile, the high priestess of the ugly-beautiful. And now that the velvet curtain has finally been pulled back, Liliana Rizzari stands exactly where she always belonged: in the canon. Note: This article is a work of creative non-fiction and speculative curation, inspired by the archetype of the forgotten female innovator in post-war Italian design.
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