Image: Collezione Maramotti, Boston
Giuditta Branconi’s exhibition ‘Cannon Fodder’ has been extended through 8 November 2026 at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy. The presentation, which opened on 8 March, is Branconi’s first solo exhibition in an institutional space and brings together a series of new paintings with a large installation made from painted canvases that visitors can physically enter.
The exhibition takes its title from the expression “cannon fodder,” referring to bodies regarded as expendable and material destined to be consumed by a larger system. At Collezione Maramotti, that idea is translated into a visual language of pressure, accumulation and confrontation. The institution describes Branconi’s images as charged forms that turn the surface of the canvas into a site of formal, emotional and political intensity.
Branconi’s paintings are built from dense combinations of images, words and symbols. Her sources range from literature, comics, newspapers, songs and instant messaging to Asian art, Victorian prints, children’s books, arabesques, tattoos and illustrated manuals. Hearts, chains, hunting scenes, clouds, faces, stars, letters, flowers, birds, skeletons and butterflies appear together in compositions that reject a clear hierarchy between high and popular culture.
Text is a particularly prominent element in the new works. Branconi uses multiple languages, alphabets and typefaces to create fragmented, diary-like fields that invite viewers to form connections or lose their way among the signs. The paintings are made on thin textiles, with imagery developed on both the front and the reverse, multiplying the possible viewpoints and levels of reading.
The exhibition’s central installation is configured as an atypical, three-dimensional triptych. Because both painted sides remain visible, the work functions as a physical threshold into Branconi’s visual world rather than as a conventional image viewed from a single position. The institution presents the installation as a space where the tensions accumulated by the canvas are transformed into movement and pictorial energy. Works in the exhibition include ‘C’est la panik sur le Périphérik’, ‘Mi ricordavo più felice di così’ and ‘Se seguissi le molliche di pane (non torneresti qui mai più)’.
Collezione Maramotti is a public-facing contemporary art collection founded in 2007 in the former first historic factory of the Max Mara Group. Its holdings comprise several hundred works made from 1945 to the present, with more than 200 displayed permanently. Alongside the permanent collection, the institution regularly invites emerging and mid-career artists to develop temporary projects conceived specifically for its spaces. ‘Cannon Fodder’ continues that programme’s focus on new painting practices and on artists expanding their individual research through ambitious bodies of work.
A bilingual Italian-English book accompanying the exhibition is published by Dario Cimorelli Editore, Milan, with a text by art historian and National Portrait Gallery curator Flavia Frigeri. Admission to ‘Cannon Fodder’ is free, with visits available Thursdays and Fridays from 2:30 to 6:30 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Collezione Maramotti is closed on 25 April and 1 May.
