Skip to main content
The Art Museum of WVU
Free Admission Browse the Collection Database

Hair in the Air, Cats on the Carpet

August 21 - December 13, 2026

The Schultz Balcony

Bea Scaccia (b. 1978, Veroli, Italy) rigorously interrogates the shifting boundary between ideals of feminine beauty and their latent grotesque undercurrents. Trained as a realist painter at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, Scaccia works more spontaneously than by plan, disassembling familiar markers of surface, adornment, and self-presentation, hair, gesture, cosmetic signifiers, and reconfiguring them into compositions that are at once seductive and destabilizing.

Recurring tropes, such as faux fur, jewels, wigs, and cloth, signify darker psychological currents beneath feminine beauty. Pearls and hair clips become infestations; the ordered elegance of Baroque and Rococo hairdos turns unavoidably disturbing. The results hover between figuration and abstraction, true parodies of bon ton that read as an existential struggle to be contained.

The triptych format intensifies this dynamic, allowing forms and motifs to echo, mutate, and proliferate across panels, suggesting a continuous, almost cinematic unfolding of identity in flux. A palpable tension between control and excess, precision and disintegration runs through the work, raising questions about how femininity is staged for an audience, and how we've come to expect to look at it.