“With My Hands Stained with Earth, I Kissed You,” the first section of the retrospective dedicated to Lea Contestabile, opens on July 17 at Palazzo Benedetti in L’Aquila as part of the “L’Aquila, Italian Capital of Culture 2026” program, promoted and supported by the City of L’Aquila. Curated by Mariano Cipollini, the exhibition will remain open through August 30 and is part of an exhibition project involving several art historians, including Barbara Drudi, Francesca Franco, and Simone Battiatto. The retrospective brings together approximately fifty works—representing the artist’s fifty-year career—which will be displayed throughout 2026 at institutional venues in L’Aquila and the surrounding province. At Palazzo Benedetti, which has reopened for the occasion, the works are presented in a dialogic manner, with a curatorial journey that connects the themes, forms, and materials of Contestabile’s artistic practice.
“Lea Contestabile’s work, viewed as a whole, helps us explore possible interpretations that do not focus exclusively on the distinctive features of her long-standing artistic practice,” says curator Mariano Cipollini. “While time, memory, the transcendent purity of a creative childhood, and the desire to preserve a legacy rooted in pride of belonging have laid the essential groundwork for her journey through the world of the visual arts, it is equally clear that the immense body of work she has produced has given us a more multifaceted view of her personality as both a woman and an artist. The depth of her accumulated knowledge leads her to conceive of the tangibility and intangibility of her works and of herself within a timeless space, where matter and thought might vanish, prompting her to confront the harshness of the end without delay. […] Everything originates from a microcosm that, after shaping her, allowed her to gather the legacies preserved at the highest point ever expressed, where love and the dignity of being are a visceral and inseparable relationship made of earth and flesh. Works freed from the hesitations of acting rightly now sanctify the completeness of understanding, purified of the fears of passing. [...] Lea Contestabile reworks the mosaic that makes up the life stories of her protagonists. She brings back to the surface faces and choices from a time now past, constructing habitats that can be adapted as needed for her emotional world, in which turmoil—of an ancestral and evocative nature—serves as a creative vein. Amid tapestries, rugs, terracotta pieces, and religious and pagan images, she weaves credible stories—bridges between her novel, the past, and probable explorations of knowledge, entrusted to future generations. A tenacious and meticulous poet, she crafts stories—both short and long—shaped by the unique features of her land, transforming them into renewed havens for the mind. In her hands are pen and ink. She transcribes the archive in her possession not to evoke regret, but to conceive connections capable of meeting the needs of the present, whose ultimate goal yearns for eternity.”
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| L’Aquila 2026: Lea Contestabile’s Retrospective Opens at Palazzo Benedetti |
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