At the elegant Muzeum Susch in the Engadin, an exhibition tells a particular story: that of Mariuccia Secol and the difficult art of remaining radical.
Unraveling, the first major institutional retrospective devoted to the Italian artist, born in 1929, spans more than seventy years of practice and reveals a trajectory that is perhaps less linear than the curatorial narrative suggests. It is the story of a language that begins with extraordinary power precisely because it is ambiguous, yet seems gradually to lose some of that ambiguity over time. Refusal, initially a necessary gesture—biographical even before it becomes political—turns into a language; that language becomes a vocabulary and, at times, grows tired.
This is perhaps the exhibition’s most compelling paradox. The Secol of the 1970s does not need to declare what she is fighting against: she unravels a dress, pulls threads from a piece of fabric, takes a scouring pad from the kitchen and brings it into the artwork. Meaning emerges from form and remains open. Decades later, when that same impulse towards refusal encounters war, politics, femicide, terrorism or ecological crisis, the opposite sometimes occurs: meaning precedes the work. A retrospective of such breadth allows us to observe something common to the careers of many artists: a language can remain coherent while losing some of its capacity to surprise. Seventy years of production cannot be expected to sustain the same intensity throughout. Art history has its magnificent exceptions: Lucio Fontana, for instance, was capable of producing decisive works even towards the end of his life, but this is hardly the rule. Longevity is a biographical blessing; artistically, it can also become a test, forcing an artist to live for decades with their own language, with what they have already discovered, and with the risk that invention may gradually turn into repertoire.
Muzeum Susch is probably one of the best places in which to undertake such an operation. Founded by the Polish collector Grażyna Kulczyk, it is a museum whose very architecture seems to demand rigour: rock, wood, voids and passageways accompany the works without ever neutralising them. Added to this is a distinct cultural history, built from the outset around rediscovering and championing women who remained on the margins—or at least insufficiently at the centre—of twentieth-century narratives. Yet it is precisely the authority of the place that makes Unravelingparticularly demanding for the artist it celebrates. Because bringing someone back into history inevitably means bringing them back into comparison.
Sabino Maria Frassà, August 20, 2026
Burnt Cities, 1959, Mariuccia Secol
Secol began as a painter. Her works of the 1950s and 1960s move through matter, abstraction and the memory of war. Already in the late 1950s, in the Burnt Cities cycle, she confronts the memory of conflict through dark, material, almost corroded painting, in which the city seems to lose its solidity and become a sediment of trauma. This is an important premise: the need to oppose and to work through a wound predates feminism and even predates her turn to textiles. II Genesi of 1968, still executed in encaustic on canvas and wood, belongs to a body of work preceding the rupture that would soon profoundly alter her practice. At the same time, from 1965 to 1988, she worked in the painting atelier of the Bizzozero-Varese psychiatric hospital, living through the years in which Franco Basaglia’s ideas were transforming attitudes towards mental illness, institutions and exclusion.
Then came 1968 and feminism.
Secol has described living a bourgeois life in which, despite being surrounded by artists and intellectuals, she felt a discomfort she was initially unable to name. Feminist consciousness-raising gave her the words to do so; art, above all, gave her a gesture. She abandoned what she called her “docile brushes” and began working with materials belonging to everyday domestic life: aprons, clothes, metal scouring pads, bread bags, fabrics and threads. In 1974 she helped found the Gruppo Femminista Immagine in Varese.
This is where the exhibition becomes truly convincing.
Paglietta di ferro (1975), from the series Strumenti ruolo femminile, possesses an almost disarming simplicity: a utensil used for scrubbing pots is removed from the kitchen and brought onto the surface of the artwork. It does not represent domestic labour: it is materially a fragment of it. Between 1974 and 1976, with Spogliazione / Destrutturazione, and then in Il grembiule (1977), what clothes the body while simultaneously helping to define its social role is dismantled and transformed. In the The Doll’s House series of 1970–73, Secol goes so far as to take apart her own clothes, including her wedding dress. Refusal is not represented: it materially takes place within the work.
Barriers, 1978, Mariuccia Secol
With Le Barriere (1978), presented in Milan as part of Mezzo Cielo, even the act of unravelling takes possession of space: threads and dismantled fabric construct a structure measuring 180 centimetres on each side, transforming a gesture that might belong to the domestic sphere into an environment that can be physically entered. This is a particularly successful period because protest and form seem to arise at the same instant. Secol does not take a fully formed political idea and then seek to illustrate it: the idea itself takes shape as she unravels, removes and tears.
Her most personal intuition is probably the “stretchmark”. Secol removes threads from the structure of the fabric, producing openings that she associates with the stretchmarks left by pregnancy on women’s skin. Surface becomes body and subtraction becomes wound. Yet it is precisely here that the decisive shift occurs: through those openings, the artist explains, “light appears, an image appears, knowledge appears.”
Perhaps the best Secol is precisely the one who cannot be completely translated.
The stretchmark originates in the female body but immediately ceases to belong solely to that body. It is a wound without being merely trauma, subtraction without being merely loss. To unravel can mean to destroy and, at the same time, to see through. The work’s power lies in keeping these possibilities open: it is precisely this surplus of meaning that frees it from the militancy from which it nevertheless originates. And it is this same ambiguity that, as the exhibition progresses, gradually begins to thin out.
The question then becomes inevitable: what happens to the “creativity of refusal” when refusal, from a necessary and historically situated gesture, becomes a permanent condition of artistic practice?
In the 1970s Secol does not need to look for something to oppose. Conflict runs directly through her own existence: marriage, motherhood, economic independence, domestic labour, the condition of women. In 1980 even the title of an exhibition, La mamma è uscita (Mother Has Gone Out), contains the idea of liberation from a role that until shortly before had seemed inescapable.
But life lasts longer than revolutions.
Secol continues to work and, above all, continues to take a position. Her field of concern expands: violence, femicide, war, politics, migration, terrorism, the environment. Unraveling interprets this development as a coherent expansion of her practice, from the female body and patriarchy towards a more universal critique of forms of oppression. The thematic continuity is there; what is harder to establish is whether it is always matched by the same formal necessity.
The retrospective itself documents a less linear history. In 1988, Femminicidio explicitly maintains the relationship between body, violence and the condition of women; shortly afterwards, with the Ogive series of 1990–91, Secol returns to painting. More than forty temperas explore a form suspended between echoes of Gothic architecture and a vegetal or bodily organism: a significant deviation that reveals how much more mobile her trajectory actually is than a straightforward progression from the personal to the universal.
In the following decades, however, the desire to intervene in the present becomes increasingly explicit. In the Postcardsof 2001–10, images drawn from current affairs and politics—Berlusconi, Kyoto, international conflicts—become surfaces on which Secol intervenes with paint, thread, embroidery, beads and appliqué. Something close to a material reversal of her original radicalism takes place: the artist who had found her strength in removing begins to add. The severity of unravelling gives way to embroidery and appliqué; the open image of the stretchmark to images whose meaning is already strongly determined.
The protest remains perfectly clear—perhaps even clearer. It is ambiguity that becomes more fragile. And a more uncomfortable doubt begins to surface: whether refusal, from a necessary gesture, sometimes ends up becoming an iconography of refusal itself. It is perhaps no coincidence that Che Guevara also appears in Secol’s later work: a universal figure of rebellion, but also an icon so culturally sedimented that protest risks becoming the emblem of protest itself. In the 1970s Secol did not need to search for a symbol of dissent: the wedding dress, the apron, the scouring pad already contained the conflict. Later, in certain works, it sometimes seems as though the artwork itself is searching for a new object against which to exercise an established vocation for opposition.
Perhaps this is where the language begins to grow tired. Not because the sincerity of Secol’s commitment diminishes, nor because the subjects become less urgent, but because what once opened up different meanings now risks becoming a formula. Some works remain compelling—as do the small Cancelli per bambola—while others seem more exposed to déjà-vu and to an almost decorative literalness precisely when they aspire to be harsher in content.
Untitled, from the II Genesi series, 1969–91, Mariuccia Secol
And it is here that the site of the exhibition inevitably becomes part of the judgement.
Muzeum Susch is not a neutral container. Its own history exposes Secol to a demanding comparison with artists who have addressed the body, matter, trauma, fibre and violence with formidable formal results. Magdalena Abakanowicz, almost Secol’s exact contemporary and a defining presence in the museum, transformed textile into mass, volume and weight until it became an autonomous language. Louise Bourgeois explored motherhood, sexuality, trauma and memory without ever allowing content to exhaust form. Marina Abramović, from a very different perspective, transformed violence from metaphor into the actual experience of the body. And in Italy, Maria Lai demonstrated how thread could become writing, relationship and space without remaining imprisoned within its domestic origins.
This is not a ranking. It is a measure. And it is the price—but also the privilege—of historicisation.
Perhaps Secol is therefore, at least in part, a fortunate victim of the very place that now celebrates her. Susch offers her a retrospective of rare care and precision, yet precisely by returning her to history it exposes her to the genealogy of women artists that the museum itself has helped to construct. The question is not whether Secol deserves rediscovery: faced with the works of the 1970s, the answer seems clear. Rather, it is which Secol most deserves to be historicised, and whether seventy years of practice can truly be understood as the expansion of one and the same radicalism.
The issue becomes still more delicate when one tries to explain why this historicisation came so late. Secol herself has suggested an answer: recalling the 1978 Venice Biennale and the international invitations that followed, she has emphasised the lesser attention she received from galleries and linked that distance, in part, to the limited consideration then afforded to feminism. It would be naïve to ignore such testimony, just as it would be naïve to deny how extensively the twentieth-century art system disadvantaged women.
But a retrospective should allow us to reopen the question, not close it.
The Scream, 1971, Mariuccia Secol
Why did Mariuccia Secol not achieve a level of historicisation comparable to that of other artists of her generation? Gender, feminism, the Italian market, galleries, the geography of her career, international networks: several factors probably played a part. But once seventy years of work are finally assembled before us, it becomes legitimate to add another consideration—the differing strength and originality of the individual periods of her practice. Not to deny the possibility of discrimination, but to avoid assuming that rediscovery must necessarily become consecration.
This is perhaps where the small short circuit at the heart of Unraveling emerges: it is conceived as a major retrospective, yet simultaneously aspires to be a thesis-driven exhibition. As a retrospective it works magnificently, because it allows us to see inventions, returns, persistence and fatigue. It becomes more fragile when it seems to draw those differences into an overly compact continuity, from feminism to war, from the body to politics, from patriarchy to ecology.
Perhaps Unraveling is most interesting precisely when it resists its own thesis.
What emerges is not necessarily a radicalism preserved intact for seventy years, but an artist who experienced a period of exceptional intensity and then continued to interrogate the world through the language that period had given her. A more selective exhibition might perhaps have presented a more compact Secol; by showing her whole, this one allows us instead to recognise her differences.
There is nothing diminishing in this. Art history is not made solely of ascending trajectories: there are moments when life, form and time coincide with unrepeatable precision, and others when that coincidence loosens. An artist can remain coherent without remaining equally surprising. It is not the artist’s fault. It is time.
And perhaps this is ultimately Unraveling’s greatest merit: it places enough of Secol before the viewer to allow us not to condemn, but to distinguish.
And so the strongest core of her work remains the period in which refusal had not yet become style, when conflict did not require an icon and the artwork did not need to seek out an enemy to name.
All she needed was a piece of fabric and to pull out a thread.
Through that void, everything could already enter.
Even light.
Untitled, from the Ogive series, 1990–1991, Mariuccia Secol
Mariuccia Secol: Unraveling
Muzeum Susch, Susch, Engadin, Switzerland
Curated by Monika Branicka and Eva Brioschi
On view until 1 November 2026
Surpunt 78, 7542 Susch/Zernez, Switzerland
Opening hours and information: official Muzeum Susch website
Cover image: detail from Postcards, 2001-2011, Mariuccia Secol. All images were taken by Sabino Maria Frassà during his visit to the exhibition, as the requested press kit was not made available.
