Ketty Gottardo studied History of Art at the University of Udine, Italy (Laurea, 1998), and later at The Courtauld (MA 2004, PhD 2012) where her research focused on Baroque prints and drawings.
Before joining The Courtauld as Martin Halusa Curator of Drawings (2016), Ketty held positions at the Louvre Museum, Paris, where she worked as a cataloguer of Italian drawings, was assistant curator in the department of paintings and drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Head of the old master drawings department at Christie’s in Paris, and associate curator of drawings at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Current and recent exhibitions and projects
Since joining The Courtauld, Ketty has worked on several exhibition projects and displays. In September 2018, she curated Antoine Caron: Drawing for Catherine de’ Medici (2018), and co-curated Drawing Together (2017) and Artists at work (2018). In 2020, after the announcement that The Courtauld had acquired Gauguin’s last manuscript Avant et Après, Ketty and her colleagues revised the transcription and translation of the manuscript which is now available online .
After the reopening of the Gallery in the Autumn of 2021 following a major refurbishment programme, Ketty co-curated with Dr Guido Rebecchini, Reader in in Sixteenth-Century Southern European Art at The Courtauld, the display Parmigianino and the Art of Experiment (2022). It examined the extraordinarily inventive and experimental graphic works by the Italian Renaissance artist Parmigianino (1503-1540) held at The Courtauld. The display was accompanied by a catalogue that presented the entire ensemble of Parmigianino works in the collection; Courtauld graduates and students were involved in the project and contributed to the catalogue.
In the same year, The Courtauld opened its doors to Fuseli and the Modern Woman. Fantasy, Fashion, Fetishism, an exhibition of drawings co-curated by Ketty with Emeritus Professor David Solkin, which examined an extremely significant but little-studied aspect of Fuseli’s graphic oeuvre. The subject of the exhibition was Fuseli’s intricate private drawings of modern women, typically shown fashionably dressed in the late eighteenth-century neoclassical manner but with hairstyles that take contemporary modes to highly idiosyncratic and extraordinarily elaborate extremes. The exhibition brought together around 50 drawings, with major loans from the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and the National Museums in Belfast.
Currently, Ketty is working at the catalogue of the Flemish drawings in the collection.
