The Barbie Picture Show

The Barbie doll, the famous plastic princess, is the star of this exhibition. She has always summed up all the stereotypes of the female body, the impossible ideal for every little girl and for every woman who strive for a perfect and unreal body. The subject lends itself, from the point of view of artistic interpretation as an element of confrontation between the real and the ideal body.

Since 1959, the year of its market launch, Barbie has become the symbol of the aesthetic tendencies of our society. Yet what is happening to women’s bodies? The idea of normality concerning the use of plastic surgery to pursue an unreachable model of beauty is becoming increasingly frequent. The homologation procedure concerning the female body only serves to underline how urgent it is to think about the anthropological mutations which technology imposes upon us under the guise of perfection at all costs, with the consequent setting of a standard which annuls personality and individualism.

The Barbie model is the flagship which powers all the industries having as their objective the profit made on the female body. Models who have made of their anorexic bodies triumphant emblems, are one of the debatable examples of a contemporary society in which the female body no longer belongs to women, but to the gaze of others.

Barbie’s body is the starting point to reflect upon and to communicate dreams, symbols, desires and memories, to compare oneself to the contemporaneity of advertising swindles, in which the female body in particular is used as an object become mere merchandise of symbolic exchanges.

In this exhibition one can “play” with Barbie and with the multitude of “perfect body” messages, thus questioning the false identity by means of the playfulness of art, aware of the fact that this time we will be the active protagonists.