Chiara Lecca. Dall’uovo alla dea nelle Stanze Segrete Doria Pamphilj

With the exhibition curated by Francesca Romana de Paolis and realized with the support of Princess Gesine Pogson Doria Pamphilj and her spouse Don Massimiliano Floridi, in collaboration with Galleria Fumagalli in Milan, Palazzo Doria Pamphilj opens the rooms of the Secret Apartments, still partially inhabited by the Pamphilj family, to contemporary art. For the occasion, two paintings conserved in the storerooms are also on display: “The Melon Seller” by Leonello Spada, once attributed to Caravaggio, and “Male Figure and Dog with a Still Life of Flowers and Fruit”, an oil on canvas from the mid 17th century.

Born in Modigliana in 1977, Chiara Lecca focuses her research on the relationship between man and nature, with the idea of giving back to art what nature produces, reworking organic and inorganic materials and transforming them into objects with a hybrid identity, almost a collection of contemporary fossils. Between resins that look like ambers and crystals, marble-like sculptures, illusory floral compositions and glass ampoules inlaid with skins and scales, her sculptures and installations (a total of eleven works, including two site-specific ones) dialogue with the furnishings, paintings and ancient statues in the Apartments in a play of cross-references and resonances. The exhibition follows the theme dear to the Pamphilj family of the four alchemical elements (fire, air, earth and water), of creation and transformation, of the cyclical nature of the seasons and the alternation of day and night.

The title of the exhibition visually delineates the exhibition itinerary, which begins with the artist’s ovoid sculptures and comes to pay homage to the goddess of the forests and animals, and at the same time evokes the birth and spirit of the Wunderkammer in vogue between the 16th and 18th centuries, the original chambers that housed unusual objects and rarities. It is no coincidence that some of the showcases in the Secret Apartments conceal rhinoceros horns and other mirabilia collected by Camillo Pamphilj, nephew of Pope Innocent X.

The exhibition ticket is also valid for the Ospitale di Santa Francesca Romana in Trastevere. Some of Chiara Lecca’s works are in fact exhibited in the chapel of the complex that includes the 17th-century “Giardino delle Delizie di Donna Olimpia” and the neoclassical hospital built by Busiri Vici.