Clemen Parrocchetti studied painting in the mid-1950s at the Brera Academy in Milan. The next decade saw her produce work that highlighted the absurdity of social straitjackets, questioning both the milieu into which she had been born—the Lombard bourgeoisie—and the roles assigned to women in Italian society. She wrote her Memorandum for an Object of Female Culture in 1973, before playing an active part in various assemblies aimed at challenging patriarchy in the art world and society at large. In 1978, she joined the Immagine collective based in Varese and participated in the Venice Biennale with its members. She fully developed her practice during these formative years, combining painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation.

Her first paintings were abstract; she only gradually moved towards grotesque and abstract representations of motherhood—the artist turned to art after the birth of her fourth child—and devouring scenes. Oscillating between life drive and death drive, the seductive and the abject, C. Parrocchetti’s representations of women are multi-faceted. Caterpillar and butterfly, devourer and protector, woman is not just a fertile being: she can also be monstrous. Her flesh overflows, transforms and— in later self-portraits— overlaps with animal silhouettes. At times, the boundaries between species become porous.

Parrocchetti’s militancy finds its way into her work; she transposes certain key feminist issues—the right to abortion and the fight against domestic violence—into her representations of the female anatomy. Certain recurring symbols she uses denounce the social limitations imposed on women. In Quattro righe affettuose per una sposa [Four loving lines for a bride], toys point the way towards becoming a perfect housewife. In Quattro tappe obbligate per un’apoteosi [Four obligatory steps towards an apotheosis] syringes evoke the nurse, swaddled child the mother, bucket and mop the housewife, spindle whorl the seamstress. Each of these reductive projections is maintained by the Catholic religion, represented here by a cross. Her materialist take on feminism echoes the approach of the Immagine collective, which revisits Marxist theories to emphasise that women must free themselves from the role into which they have been confined: that of a child-bearing machine.

In the 1990s, C. Parrocchetti developed an interest in life forms often considered as secondary. Instead of seeing the moths that proliferated in her home and consumed her textile works as enemies, she depicted them as complex and resilient creatures. Her drawings—which also feature lice, grasshoppers, scorpions, cockroaches, and other insects—present them as powerful life forms rather than pests. In her work, women and insects are no longer prey, but predators: her sculptures feature moths holding prey made out of fabric; her paintings and banners—mouths about to scream or devour. The strength, and at times violence, of nature’s cycles— birth, devouring, and death—is evoked in the artist’s work in all its ambivalence, underlining the inherent complexity of the female condition.