March On
By Osman Can Yerebakan
December 3, 2025
Resistance is a nonlinear, spiritual, and collective act for Luisa Rabbia. In the Italian painter’s largest work to date, she sets the scene.
Just over two months ago, Luisa Rabbia stood at her Bushwick studio and decided that a painting she had spent over a year on, The Network, was finally ripe. “I felt the energy coming through,” she says of the monumental work of stoic women marchers, a nexus of almost-audible energy—the largest painting of her career. “There was nothing to change anymore.” The realization was sudden for the Italian artist. Now on view at Peter Blum Gallery’s presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach’s Meridians sector, which is dedicated to works beyond the size of a typical booth, the 18-foot-wide The Network confronts viewers with its poetic procession. No work is, perhaps, better suited to the section than Rabbia’s tour de force.
Beyond its larger-than-life dimensions, the scenography arrests with the artist’s surgical command of detail. Rabbia’s approach involves adding and removing paint, almost sculpting with it as she lets figures emerge from the surface. “There is a moment in which a face makes sense, and until that moment I apply layers to find that shape,” she says. The central panel has two women—one large and the other smaller behind her. This maternal attention to every inch stems from her initial urge to make a painting in response to the deteriorating women’s rights across the world and the rising number of femicides. She made a deliberate choice to avoid literal interpretation, and instead found herself drawn to Social Realist Italian painter Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s seminal work The Fourth Estate, 1901, which depicts workers during a labor strike. The painting, which today hangs at Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan, holds a cinematic grandiosity in its embodiment of collective upheaval; human forms carry a commanding lightness common in depictions of mythic gods and goddesses. Veiled by an earthy palette, da Volpedo’s painting complicates the line between harsh truths and bodily transcendence in its juxtaposition and confrontational use of scale. “I wanted to use this structure of people advancing towards the viewer to have their rights recognized,” explains Rabbia.
So she began painting her conduction of marchers, some of whom are goddesses and others hybrids between humans and mythic beings. A lunar energy shrouds the work; the Venus of Willendorf carries a child in her belly, and a Roman goddess in the center with countless breasts stands over a small moon which could be “where all the energies converge,” says Rabbia. The goddess manages to remain in balance over the tiny lunar symbol “despite all the adversities,” she adds. Towards the right of the scene, a monolithic divine figure seems to give birth to another upside-down being. The artist calls the right section “the panel of regeneration” for its abundance of two-headed figures sharing the same body, referencing ancient civilizations who worshiped women for their transformative power of giving birth. “In this painting, this idea of a transformer means a power to transform tears into joy,” she adds. “These figures are not only marching for their rights but they are also celebrating their own beings.”
The title underlines a sense of camaraderie: “Women have always created a network to sustain each other.” Upside-down figures under the marching women, as well as countless others spreading across the background, frame protest as nonlinear, an ancestral inheritance. Fists rise in solidarity on the horizon like towering trees behind the women. Faces, some of which have gaped mouths to hint at a humming inner voice, reminders of singularity within the multitude. Rabbia’s marches symbolize personal histories and the burdens they carry even in the largest crowds. As she observes, “Faces come as they want to, with their multitude of expressions, always in relation to the body they carry.”