Artist, performer, chanteuse, actress, writer, and self-proclaimed Popess, as well as muse to Renato Guttuso and Remo Brindisi, Maria Sole (Genoa, 1937) is a fragment of Italian avant-garde, a pivotal icon and wrongly forgotten artist, awaiting rediscovery.

The works of Maria Sole, simultaneously punk and rich in theatricality, are at constant play between iconoclasm, Dadaism, and social and feminist themes. 

Her voice anticipated discourses that remain powerfully relevant today: the role of women in Italian society, sexual liberation, and the intersection of art and the body. The titles of her compositions speak volumes: The Crucified is Dancing Rock 'n' Roll, Sono io Alain Delon (I am Alain Delon), Pelo potere (Hair power). 

"I insist on the concept of the Popess because I believe that a woman born of a woman has the same right as a man to hold the papacy - or, if not the papacy itself, at least to inhabit it in the minds of the people. Popes are sometimes pawns of the Church; a Popess, on the other hand, would never accept such servitude." 

The exhibition Maria Sole, Giubileo, curated by Ragazzi di Strada in collaboration with Talento and Orrore a 33 Giri in the spaces of art gallery Galera San Soda, Milan, brings on show for the first time ever the paintings of Maria Sole.

The curated selection captures her multifaceted poetics. Provocative, ethereal, and ghostly elements coexist on canvas, distilling the spirit of an artist whose self-portraits as Popess stand alongside faces, floral motifs, and abstract visions. The viewer is immersed in brushstrokes that evoke a candied, seemingly naïve world-behind which lurk glimpses of unsettling darkness, much like in her songs. In the year of the Church's Jubilee and the election of a new pontiff, Maria Sole's Giubileo offers a situationist counterpoint to the papal throne: it is the artist's own act of absolution, offered to her audience.

For the occasion, Ragazzi di Strada curated the exhibition visual identity and set-up, with custom-made frames, as well as an installation at the entrance of the exhibition: a cross made of Maria Sole archival portraits, which celebrates the centrality of the religious theme in the artist’s practice.