Sveva Caetani: Forma e Frammento

The MAXXI’s Spazio Extra is hosting the first Italian retrospective dedicated to Sveva Caetani with over 200 works, documents and archival materials reconstructing the artistic and personal history of a little-known artist, and revealing the complexity, depth and originality of her work.

Sveva was the daughter of Leone Caetani, Duke of Sermoneta, one of the leading Islamists of the 20th century and a descendant of the noble and ancient Caetani family, to which Boniface VIII, the pope who established the first Jubilee in 1300, also belonged. Following her father’s death in 1935 and the hardships faced by her mother, Ofelia Fabiani, Sveva experienced a long period of isolation in Vernon, Canada (where the family had settled in 1921), but she transformed her pursuit of knowledge, through in depth and extensive reading, into a tool for resistance and rebirth.

The exhibition explores the many facets of her work —painterly, literary, and spiritual—combining fragments of her life and imagination. At the heart of the exhibition is Recapitulation, a monumental cycle of 47 watercolors dedicated to the memory of her beloved father. Conceived in 1975 and worked on for over fourteen years, the cycle is a symbolic narrative of her family history and her inner journey, deeply influenced by her father. For the first time, the series is being presented in its entirety in Italy, thus fulfilling the artist’s wish, which remained unfulfilled during her lifetime.

A section of the exhibition focuses on the life of Sveva Caetani and the history of her family, with previously unseen documentary material (photographs, audio recordings, videos, drawings, letters, portraits and sculptures). The exhibition also includes a selection of works by Houda Kabbaj (Casablanca, 1985), which recall the enigmatic figures of Sveva, and a work by Carlo Benvenuto created for the exhibition: a cruelly intimate photograph of family dynamics.

Header: Sveva Caetani, The Summons, 1978, watercolor on paper​