by InTrieste
University of Trieste has opened a new permanent gallery in its Gorizia campus dedicated to the late Trieste-born painter Annamaria Ducaton and her celebrated cycle of paintings La donna del mare (“Woman of the Sea”).
The gallery, inaugurated on May 21 at the university’s Via Alviano campus in Gorizia, presents the 28 surviving works from the series, originally created between 1984 and 1985 and donated to the university in 2024 during celebrations marking the institution’s centennial.
Inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s 1889 play The Lady From the Sea, the series explores themes of identity, inheritance, freedom and memory through layered mixed-media compositions that combine photography, abstraction and literary references. The works also reflect Ducaton’s personal dialogue with her mother, the actress Giannina Herman Macknig, whose image appears throughout the cycle alongside that of the artist herself.
Named the Galleria Ducaton, the new exhibition space occupies the first floor of the right wing of the university’s Gorizia headquarters. University officials described the project as both a tribute to the artist, who died earlier this year, and an effort to strengthen the institution’s role in preserving and promoting cultural heritage through its university museum system.
Though primarily intended as a permanent academic and cultural resource, the gallery is expected to open to outside visitors by appointment in the coming months.
Born in Trieste in 1936, Ducaton grew up in an artistic environment and initially studied piano before turning to painting. Over the course of her career, she held dozens of solo exhibitions across Italy and abroad, including in Austria, Slovenia, Finland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Venezuela and the United States. Her work frequently drew on literature and music, developing thematic cycles that blended autobiographical elements with broader cultural and psychological inquiry.
In La donna del mare, the sea functions as both symbol and setting — an ever-present metaphor for emotional depth, instability and the longing for autonomy. Fluid forms and shifting colors evoke inner landscapes where figures emerge and dissolve into dreamlike marine environments. Quotations from Ibsen’s play accompany several works, reinforcing the tension between attachment and escape that runs throughout the series.
The paintings also foreground questions of female identity and self-determination. Isolated female figures appear suspended between belonging and estrangement, inhabiting surreal spaces that mirror the psychological complexity of Ibsen’s heroine, Ellida, and, by extension, the artist’s own reflections on family and personal freedom.
The result is a body of work that merges photography, symbolism and abstraction into a layered meditation on memory and human relationships — one now given a permanent home in the cross-border cultural landscape of Gorizia.
