Estorick Collection presents the first UK museum exhibition dedicated to Ketty La Rocca.
This autumn, the Estorick Collection presents the first UK museum exhibition dedicated to Ketty La Rocca (1938–1976) You You, (10 Sept - 21 Dec 2025), a trailblazing figure in Italian conceptual and feminist art. Though her career was cut short by her untimely death at the age of 38, La Rocca’s work has left a lasting impact, and this landmark exhibition brings her bold, thought-provoking vision to a wider audience.
Featuring over 50 rarely seen works from the artist’s Estate, led by her son Michelangelo Vasta, the show traces La Rocca’s artistic evolution – from her early critical engagement with mass media and experiments with visual poetry to her celebrated Riduzioni (Reductions). In these powerful pieces, she transformed photographic imagery through language and mark-making, fragmenting and deconstructing the image to explore identity, communication and the body.
A founding member of the avant-garde collective Gruppo 70, La Rocca merged art with poesia visiva (visual poetry), confronting the limitations of patriarchal language structures and advocating for alternative forms of expression. Her practice often centred on the human hand – an expressive tool for both gesture and communication – and expanded into striking sculptural works, including large-scale alphabetic forms in black PVC.
La Rocca’s work has garnered growing international acclaim in recent years; it has been featured in major exhibitions including the Venice Biennale and can be found in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Centre Pompidou and the Uffizi. Resonant and urgent, La Rocca’s work feels remarkably contemporary – interrogating consumer culture and gender dynamics with clarity and force.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of talks and workshops, as well as a fully illustrated publication featuring newly commissioned essays.