To Devour Life
Curated by Fanny Gonnella
Frac Lorraine, Metz
13 March – 17 August 2025

This exhibition presents for the first time in France the work of Italian artist Clemen Parrocchetti (1923-2016, Milan) in all its diversity.

The author of a prolific, diverse body of work, Clemen Parrocchetti is equally at home in drawing, sculpture and installation. This freedom resonates with the freedom she has granted herself in her artistic exploration of roles traditionally assigned to women. Untangling the absurdity of this social straightjacket, she also uncovers surprising relations to forms of life often considered secondary or harmful – such as moths, a guiding motif in her work.

Parrocchetti’s playful hijacking of materials and symbols borrows from expressionist painting, pop art, craft, and surrealism to give shape to images and volumes that resonate with our times. In presenting her work for the first time in France, Frac Lorraine continues its exploration of invisibilised artistic genealogies by bringing women artists back into canon.

By fragmenting the female body — into mouths, breasts, vulvas — Clemen Parrocchetti criticizes in her work the male gaze’s objectification of women. Her representations of female anatomy transpose certain struggles of the feminist movement, which are still relevant today: the right to abortion as an emancipatory demand, the fight against domestic violence, etc.

Later in her life, Clemen Parrocchetti developed a fascination for moths; instead of seeing the moths that proliferated in her home and consumed her textile works as enemies, she depicted them as complex and resilient creatures. Her drawings, which also feature lice, grasshoppers, scorpions, cockroaches and other insects, humorously challenge these subjects’ apparent banality and present them as powerful life forms rather than as pests. Clemen Parrocchetti establishes relationships with nature that bridge human/animal and pest/ally divides, inviting us to rethink such categories and renegotiate our relationship with nature in order to find inspiration for the society to come.