Silvia Giambrone: I Lie

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents I LIE, Silvia Giambrone's first solo exhibition, which, with a new body of work centred on lying as an ontological and political structure of the present, continues her investigation into abuse and violence.

Giambrone's practice analyses the shadow zones of the contemporary with an uncompromising radicality. In an artistic landscape often crowded with superficial adherence to mainstream social themes, Silvia Giambrone — one of the first voices of her generation to elevate feminist and identity-based concerns to a cultivated, erudite and universal dimension — anticipated analyses that have since become central. Her works are genuine acts of intellectual and political resistance.

Her investigation into the domestic is conducted as a systematic deconstruction of private space, understood not as a refuge but as the primary site of tension and domestication. 

The home, then, becomes the first laboratory of power, where relationships and bodies are shaped through invisible signs and dynamics of silent submission.

The objects that populate this scenario — silverware, flower vases, clocks, chairs and pillows — lose their innocuous function to become indifferent witnesses to domestic violence or unwitting instruments of coercion. The domestic aesthetic is thus examined as a mask of decorum designed to conceal alienation, where the familiar is transformed into the uncanny.

The artist explores the "low voice" of trauma: a background noise composed of punitive silences and bureaucracies of affection, revealing how the domestic environment is the terrain on which the first, radical betrayal of human authenticity unfolds in favour of social and gender performance.

Lying itself becomes the subject of investigation, because unmasking the material of which everyday objects are made means revealing a counterfeit reality, maintained as such to preserve structures of power. Giambrone performs an act of desacralisation of the lie: she strips away the poetic veil from betrayal to return a "healthy" terror to the viewer, capable of awakening consciousness.

The artist does not seek to rekindle the fire of truth, but documents, with surgical lucidity, the shape of the void it has left behind. To transform betrayal into a star of iron or a law of marble is how Giambrone engages with reality in spite of its betrayal of her. By showing how one becomes lost, the artist indicates, by subtraction, the only way to find oneself again: the chronicle of a heart that does not stop beating amid the ruins.

The exhibition presents, for the first time, a new body of work by Silvia Giambrone. Among the works presented is the series Apocalyps, through which the artist transforms family silverware — a symbol of status, continuity and memory — into fragments and "luxury rubble", revealing the fragility of the symbolic structures that sustain power and the construction of truth. This reflection continues in the series Dura lex sed lex, which examines the way in which the lie attempts to institutionalise itself through legal form. Engraved in marble, the works render permanent that which is by nature unstable and ambiguous, transforming betrayal into norm. The theme of regulation and control is taken up again in Authenticity certificate, which stages the bureaucratisation of intimacy and desire.

From the domestic and juridical space, the artist's gaze finally extends to a cosmic dimension with Il cielo stellato, a series in which the firmament appears subject to logics of domination and coercion. Here the dodecahedron — a traditional symbol of harmony and perfection — is rendered in raw iron, transforming the idea of universal order into an image of tension and violence. I LIE represents the culmination of the artist's creative journey. In this neon work, Giambrone finds her definitive voice, making explicit the collective nature of contemporary lying; a declaration that transforms individual confession into a public manifesto, marking the collapse of trust in language and in the very idea of truth.

The works: Cage #1 and Cage #2 are courtesy of Galleria Stefania Miscetti and were produced for the exhibition Sub Rosa at Palazzo Doria Pamphilj.