The Liliana Bloch Gallery is proud to present “Loving is Caring” a solo exhibition from Italian artist Dr. Francesca Brunetti, to open our 2026 programming.
Dr. Brunetti’s exhibition brings together two bodies of work centered on ecofeminism and philosophy. The Mushrooms of Plato’s Cave reimagines Plato’s myth through a post-human, ecofeminist lens. In Brunetti’s narrative, the protagonist chooses not to ascend toward the sun and abstract thought, as the male prisoner does in Plato’s tale. Instead, the figure descends underground into a world inhabited by fungi, worms, and bacteria.
The second series, Soil Party: Rats, Roots, Worms, and Other Punks, is a multimedia project created through watercolor, animation, and sound. The work draws from Indigenous, feminist, and environmental philosophies that question dominant Western ideas about nature and materiality. These thinkers note that traditional Western thought often positions soil, and other marginalized entities referenced in the title, as a passive background to the actions of the white male subject. Soil Party instead embraces soil as an active, sentient, and creative presence.
Read together, these works form a critical artistic response that speaks to broader conversations about environment, embeddedness, and social justice. Through a fantastical and richly colorful visual language, the project invites viewers to reconsider soil not as inert matter but as a thriving, diverse, and generative entity.
Dr. Brunetti is both an artist and a scholar. She completed a PhD in Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Texas at Dallas, an MA in Communication Design from the Glasgow School of Art, and a BA and MA in Philosophy from La Sapienza University of Rome.
Her work has been exhibited at the Shanghai Art Museum, in Shanghai, China, Art Center Nabi in Seoul, Korea, the Chinese European Art Centre, in Xiamen, China, Linköping University, in Linköping, Sweden, University of Texas at Dallas, to name a few. Her artistic projects have been presented at international academic conferences, and her writing has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as appeared in Art Journal, Cogent Arts & Humanities, Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, and Visual Culture & Gender.