From February 25 to May 4, 2026, Villa Medici presents Fotoromanzo, the first institutional exhibition in Italy of the French artist Nicole Gravier, a pioneer of visual détournement of media images.

Born in Arles in 1949, Nicole Gravier uses photography to analyze and deconstruct the stereotypes of mass communication. Settling in Italy in the early seventies, first in Rome and then in Milan, she is particularly interested in the influence of fotoromanzo in popular culture.

In the series Myths & Clichés: Fotoromanzi, the artist appropriates the codes of Italian fotoromanzo from the 1970s through scenes that ironically distort the repetitive poses, stereotyped behaviors, and clichés of the genre. Her work invites to deconstruct the patriarchal narrative of images, based on the subordination of women and the ideal of fulfillment through love and marriage.

The series Myths & Clichés: Advertising continues this path by manipulating images of mass culture, especially fashion and women's magazines. The artist demystifies the normative models of happiness, beauty, and success conveyed by a society still largely imbued with conformity.

Through stylistic codes that are both ironic and subtle, Nicole Gravier asserts strong socio-political positions. Her work falls within the current of "semiotic" art. Like Roland Barthes in Fragments of a Lover's Discourse (1976), Nicole Gravier questions how signs produce meaning, manufacture myths, and lend themselves to détournement. By cutting out, recomposing, reworking, and disturbing images, the artist highlights the commonplaces of visual narratives, destabilizes the text, and humorously reveals the processes of manufacturing the fiction of the feminine. Her gesture brings to light the mechanisms of symbolic domination and invites the viewer to question what they believe they see. Her work finds a particular echo in the Italian feminist revolution of the seventies, which questions the power of language and image following in the footsteps of artists and theorists like Carla Lonzi, Mirella Bentivoglio, and Tomaso Binga.