"I have always been fascinated by Italy, a country where life unfolds like a theater — at times sophisticated and lyrical, at others raw and improvised in the everyday."
— Kourtney Roy
Opening Reception on Thursday, November 6, from 6 to 9 pm
Exhibition from Thursday, November 6 to Saturday, December 20, 2025
During her most recent residency in Naples, at Spot Home Gallery, Kourtney Roy continues her exploration of the staged self-portrait in a new and unpublished series that delves into the heart of the city’s urban margins. True to her visual language, she draws on the Italian cinematic imagination — between neorealism and popular comedies — to create a body of work that is at once whimsical and melancholic. Far removed from tourist clichés, she captures an inverted Naples, exuberant and secret, mirroring her characters.
With this new photographic series, the artist traverses the city’s interstices, its shadows, its liminal spaces — “the unself of Naples”. She subverts stereotypes and fixed emblems to reveal a less visible, more ambiguous Naples, where one moves between façades and fictions. Inspired by films such as Reality or Dogman by Matteo Garrone, as well as Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and Fellini’s Amarcord — whose character La Volpina lends its name to the exhibition — Roy conjures female figures that are at once fierce and flamboyant, stern yet tender, clad in cheap, garish clothes that become vehicles for noisy, baroque, and resilient identities. All of Roy’s images, where reality itself becomes a stage set and her vibrant characters burst forth, resemble fragments of a film whose script she is constantly rewriting. In these stagings, photography becomes a site of performance, where the artist’s own body, multiplied through her many doubles, questions the limits of the gaze, oscillating between provocation and vulnerability.
This Neapolitan body of work extends the personal mythology Kourtney Roy has been building for years: a timeless world of illusions and faded glamour. This universe, which has become her signature, is also expressed in two other series, Trashissima and Last Paradise (Swiss Life 4 Hands Prize, 2024, with Mathias Delplanque), some as yet unseen works of which will be shown alongside this new production. Together, they form a kind of journey through Italy, where displacement is as much internal as geographical. The project unfolds as a fragmented, poetic, and ironic narrative, one that probes Italian imagery as much as the mechanisms of self-representation.
