“Amelia” at UNA Galleria, Piacenza
Author: Michela Ceruti
Published Tuesday,June 30, 2026
This terrain has become remarkably –– maybe even too familiar –– over the past decade or so. Since the late 2010s, contemporary art has repeatedly returned to the monstrous feminine – in practices such as the work of Monster Chetwynd, the sculptural imaginaries of Marguerite Humeau, or the myth-inflected paintings of Paula Rego – as well as to magic, mythological, and occult forms of resistance. Such imagery once carried the excitement of rediscovery, reopening histories that had long been marginalized or dismissed. Today, however, these motifs occupy a more ambiguous position. They remain fertile, certainly, but they no longer feel inherently disruptive. Rather, they have become part of a recognizable visual language, a shared vocabulary through which questions of gender are often articulated.
What makes “Amelia” compelling then is not so much its thematic framework as the distinct ways each artist inhabits it. In Beatrice Alici’s paintings, mythological and folkloric references unfold through dense, luminous surfaces, as in Nightfall 3 (2026). Her figures seem suspended between apparition and material presence, emerging from darkness only to retreat into it. Alici’s world is populated by symbols whose meanings remain tantalizingly incomplete, as if each canvas were preserving fragments of a larger narrative that can never quite be reconstructed. The paintings resist straightforward interpretation, favoring atmosphere over declaration. Anaïs Horn approaches the body from a different direction, one more grounded in transformation and intimacy. Her work often treats identity as something provisional, assembled through rituals of adornment, performance, and exchange. In the context of “Amelia,” the contribution introduces a quieter register, attentive to the ways bodies become sites of projection but also of care. This is particularly evident in Judith (2026), an installation that resembles a domestic shelving system, almost like a fragment of a home interior, on and within which vintage photographs of domestic scenes and furnishings are displayed and subsequently altered through Horn’s interventions, introducing mythological figures such as mermaids into otherwise ordinary settings. Rather than presenting femininity as a fixed category, Horn allows it to remain unstable, relational, and continually negotiated. A similar sensitivity can be found in the work of Amalia Vekri, whose practice frequently draws upon archetypal female figures while refusing to reduce them to symbols. Her works seem to exist somewhere between ancient myth and contemporary image culture, occupying a temporal space where historical narratives and present anxieties overlap. Vekri’s contribution is perhaps the clearest reminder that these themes continue to resonate in specific geographical and cultural contexts.
Across recent years, artists working in and around the Mediterranean have repeatedly returned to folklore, spirituality, and collective memory as ways of thinking through contemporary conditions. In that sense, the exhibition’s concerns feel less nostalgic than cyclical, resurfacing through different cultural lenses. Yet it is Lula Broglio who leaves the strongest impression. Her paintings possess an unusual balance of tenderness and strangeness. Figures, animals, plants, and architectural fragments coexist within scenes that feel simultaneously domestic and dreamlike. Her contribution consists of four small-scale paintings forming a single series, each a close-up portrait of a female musician captured in the act of playing. Yet the instruments remain outside the frame, leaving only facial expressions and micro-gestures to carry the sense of sound, rhythm, and intensity. This absence becomes crucial: the images oscillate between performance and ambiguity, as if the emotional register of music were detached from its material source. Broglio’s paintings thus resist straightforward narrative reading, offering instead a space where expression remains open and unsettled. Broglio’s imagery avoids the rhetorical weight that sometimes accompanies discussions of the feminine sublime. Instead, her paintings are permeated by a sense of everyday enchantment. They are strange without insisting on their strangeness, magical without becoming allegorical. Looking at them, one has the feeling that transformation is not an exceptional event but an ordinary condition of being alive.
This quality becomes increasingly valuable throughout the exhibition. Where some works operate within established iconographies of female otherness, Broglio’s paintings seem less concerned with representing identity than with describing a particular mode of attention. Their power lies in their ability to make the familiar appear newly mysterious.
Perhaps the pants toward a broader tension within “Amelia.” The exhibition is strongest when it moves away from the symbolic burden of its central themes and toward more specific experiences of embodiment, perception, and desire. The monstrous, magical, or vampiric body remains a potent figure, but it is no longer the only– or necessarily the most urgent– way to speak about femininity in 2026. Contemporary discussions around gender increasingly engage with technology, labour, ecology, migration, aging, and forms of social interdependence that exceed older binaries of empowerment and oppression. Against this backdrop, the show occasionally feels attached to a vocabulary whose radicalism has softened through repetition.
Still, there is something generous about its insistence on imagination. At a moment when contemporary life often appears relentlessly literal, “Amelia” allows itself the pleasure of ambiguity. It embraces uncertainty, fantasy, and the possibility of becoming otherwise. Earhart’s disappearance lingers over the exhibition not as a tragedy but as an opening: a space where certainty gives way to speculation, where identity remains unresolved.
Like the aviator herself, the works gathered here drift between fact and fiction, presence and absence. They remind us that myths persist not because they offer answers, but because they leave questions suspended in the air. Nearly nine years after Earhart vanished into the horizon, that suspension still exerts its pull. Whether or not the imagery of witches, monsters, and magic women feels entirely contemporary, “Amelia” suggests that the desire to imagine other ways of inhabiting the world remains as compelling as ever.
Amelia is on view at UNA Galleria through October 30, 2026.
About the author: Michela Ceruti is a writer based in Milan. She is the managing editor of Flash Art Magazine.k