Mariuccia Secol
Mariuccia Secol was born in 1929 in Castellanza, a town in northern Italy.
After completing her artistic education under the guidance of Galliano Mazzon, Professor Pasquale Bossi, and Francesco Fedeli, she devoted herself in the 1950s and 1960s to abstract painting. Inspired by the paintings of the Tuscan catacombs in Cerveteri and Tarquinia, she chose to use one of the eldest painting techniques – encaustic painting.
Starting in 1964, under the mentorship of Professor Edoardo Balduzzi, she led an art workshop in a psychiatric hospital in Varese. In time, she took full charge of the course, expanding its scope to include poetry-writing courses. Her perennial work with the patients sensitised her to issues of psychological and physical violence as well as social exclusion, and taboos.
The political upheavals of 1968 prompted Secol to abandon painting and dedicate herself fully to the feminist movement. In 1974, alongside Milli Gandini, Clemen Parocchetti, Silvia Cibaldi, and Mariagrazia Sironi, she co-founded the Gruppo Feminist Immagine di Varese (the Imagination Feminist Group of Varese). In a society steeped in Catholic tradition and patriarchal structures, their activism was of particular significance, advocating not only for women’s rights but also for the recognition of female artists in the institutional art world. Their efforts culminated in events such as the Voliamo – Vo(G)liamo. Donna-Arte-Società conference at the Brera Academy in Milan (1978). The group engaged in performances, political demonstrations, and the publication of manifestos in feminist journals.
Following a few-year-long hiatus from art, Secol returned with a striking series of abstract sculptures titled Silent Musical Instruments (1970). Her artistic practice then evolved towards assemblages made from domestic objects—aprons, broken plates, and steel scouring pads—forming the series Instruments of Women’s Roles (c. 1975). Later, deeply moved by Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, she started working on a series of works bearing the same title, using her own garments—including her wedding dress—which she cut and reassembled into tapestries. From that moment onward fabric became her primary medium, a vessel through which she explored themes of domestic violence, femicide, abortion as well as women’s solidarity. One of such textile pieces – Mantello – io / Cloak – I (1974), she later used in the performance Spogliazione / The Undressing, during which a group of women artists staged a public protest against male dominance in contemporary art.
At the height of the social transformations of the 1970s, the group Immagine was invited to the groundbreaking feminist edition of the 1978 Venice Biennale. There, in collaboration with a group of Sicilian women artists, they created the exhibition Spazio Aperto.
In the later years of her practice, Secol refined her textile practice, using embroidery techniques she had first learned in a convent school. She developed her unique method of fabric deconstruction, pulling threads loose to create frayed, wounded surfaces—symbolic for the scars on women’s bodies. Alongside these textile works, she also created ceramics of biomorphic shapes.
Secol’s inspirations extended beyond the female body and societal roles to literature and contemporary music, as seen in her wall-hanging textile series Suono senza tempo / Sound Without Time (1986). Her works responded sharply to political events, both global and local, as well as to environmental concerns—one such ceramic series mourned the felling of the last mulberry trees, whose cultivation had been the economic backbone of her region for centuries.
Many of her exhibitions were organised together with her closest friend, Milli Gandini. At the age of 92, Secol co-authored a book with Gandini, La mamma è uscita (Mother Has Left), a deeply personal recollection of their lives and their journey into feminism.
Though Mariuccia Secol participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, she has remained largely overlooked by the global art world. Only recently have her works begun to receive the recognition they deserve, featured in major feminist art exhibitions such as The Unexpected Subject: 1978 – Art and Feminism in Italy at the FM Centre for Contemporary Art in Milan and Cooking, Cleaning, Caring: Care Work in the Arts Since 1960 at the Joseph Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop.
Mariuccia Secol continues to live and work in Daverio, near Milan.
