Let yourself be surprised by an Italy you've never seen before. At the Les Filles du Calvaire gallery in Paris, artist Kourtney Roy presents La Volpina, a photo exhibition inspired by her artistic residency at the Spot Home Gallery in Naples. From November 6 to December 20, 2025, this new series explores the genre ofstaged self-portraiture, in a cinematic aesthetic inspired by Italian cinema.
Through photographs of marginal urban settings, Kourtney Roy reveals a secret and melancholic Naples, far from tourist clichés. Between liminal spaces, outrageous costumes, and visual narration, the exhibition questions notions of identity, self-representation, and collective fantasy.
In La Volpina, Kourtney Roy subverts clichés about Italy to reveal its cracks, tensions, and forgotten identities. She draws inspiration from the imagination of transalpine cinema—from neorealism to popular comedy—relying on references from Pasolini, Fellini, and Matteo Garrone to construct a dense universe that is both raw and dreamlike.
The photographs reveal a Naples without tourist trappings, shaped by powerful female characters, heavily made up, dressed in garish clothes, emerging like baroque ghosts in a landscape that is both real and invented. La Volpina, literally "the little fox," takes its name from a character in the film Amarcord, an emblem of marginal, whimsical, and elusive femininity.
In this universe of pretense and faded glamour, the artist stages her own image in a series where the body becomes a backdrop, a mask, and a narrative. This practice ofnarrative self-portraiture, which Kourtney Roy has been cultivating for several years, is extended here through a mental, poetic, and fragmented journey.The exhibition does not stop at La Volpina, but also features works from her Trashissima and Last Paradise series (winner of the 2024 Swiss Life Prize, with Mathias Delplanque), forming a photographic triptych between Naples, fantasy, and intimate chaos.
You will find yourself faced with disturbing, almost unsettling images, where everyday life is transformed by artifice, where liminal spaces—wastelands, backyards, frozen interiors—become the stage for visual performances. If you are curious to discover conceptual photography that plays with the codes of cinema, identity, and urban decor, this exhibition is fertile ground.
La Volpina is for those who love contemporary photographic art, multi-layered visual narratives, and challenging artistic proposals. If you are passionate aboutItaly, cinema, or representations of femininity in its most baroque forms, you will find food for thought and contemplation here.
On the other hand, this exhibition may confuse lovers of classic photography, postcard landscapes, or traditional portraits. Kourtney Roy does not seek to seduce, but to question, to expose gray areas, to blur boundaries. The atmosphere is dense, ambiguous, sometimes uncomfortable, but always rich in interpretations and sensations.
The Les Filles du Calvaire gallery, known for its commitment to contemporary photographic creation, provides an immersive setting for this visual exploration. Between cinematic fiction and urban reality, Kourtney Roy's photographs form a choreography of mental images that will leave you with more questions than answers.
Why should you go? Because La Volpina invites you on an inner journey as much as an aesthetic one, into an Italy distorted by the artist's eye, between bitter laughter, urban poetry, and silent tragedies. A sensory experience for those who want to look beyond the surface, into the murky areas where fiction is born.
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Dates and Opening Time
From November 6, 2025 to December 20, 2025
Location
Galerie Les Filles du calvaire
21 Rue Chapon
75003 Paris 3
Access
Filles du Calvaire metro station
Prices
Free
Official website
www.fillesducalvaire.com
More information
Open Tuesdays from 2:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., and Wednesday through Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Closed on public holidays. Opening reception on Thursday, November 6, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
