The black spray paint is still on the walls at Rosso20sette, a small contemporary gallery in Rome a few blocks from Campo de’ Fiori. On the afternoon of October 27, three men in hoods walked in, cornered gallerist Stefano Ferraro and threatened to beat him to death, according to Ferraro. Then they started ragging the artwork.
The exhibition, The Collapse of Democracy, is the latest from Laika, Rome’s masked street artist, whose politically charged paste-ups come down about as fast as they go up. It’s the second chapter of a project that took her across the United States “to understand the country that rules the Western world,” as she puts it. Roughly two dozen canvases, works on paper and installations take aim at Trump, immigration raids, guns, money and war. Her satirical pop images turn the icons of power against themselves: Trump on his knees before the Pope, Iron Man panhandling, a U.S. tank rolling over human rights. Most of them were defaced.
According to la Repubblica and Corriere della Sera, two of Italy’s leading newspapers, the case is with DIGOS, the Italian police unit that handles political extremism, and forensic officers have been over the scene. Investigators are reportedly looking for three men and pulling footage from street cameras nearby. There were none inside the gallery.
The men spoke with Roman accents, according to Ferraro. Beyond that, nothing. No flyers, no claim of responsibility, no arrests. He reads it as neo-fascist intimidation, though he told ANIMAL that’s his interpretation, not a certainty.
The gallery’s printed statement doesn’t hedge. Handed out to visitors, it calls the attack an aggressione squadrista, a squadrista assault. The word carries weight in Italy. The squadristi were Mussolini’s Blackshirt gangs, who beat leftists and wrecked socialist newspapers and union halls in the early 1920s on the way to taking power. Italians still use the term for organized political thuggery more than a century later.
On the street, Laika expects to lose work. “When you put something on the street, it’s the street that decides the destiny of what you put,” she told ANIMAL. Her 2025 poster of Hitler kissing Netanyahu came down in Monteverde district in less than 24 hours. Last month, in the old Jewish Ghetto, she pasted up The Untouchables: Netanyahu and an IDF soldier standing in a pool of blood under a glass bell jar, a play on the Italian expression for shielding something from criticism. The piece protests a proposed Italian bill on antisemitism that, she says, would censor criticism of Israel’s government. It lasted about a week. But that’s the deal she signed up for. Posters get ripped up, buffed and gone over.
A gallery is something else. To Laika, hitting canvases inside a private gallery is an attack on the art world itself, and proof the work is landing. “I started this project trying to stimulate a debate. Apparently I for sure stimulated something, a sort of reaction, but it was really violent. Which means that my artworks go straight to the point.” Still, she won’t play the victim. “What happened to me is nothing compared to what happens every day in my country, and in your country especially,” she said, referring to ICE. “You have something that looks like the German Gestapo.”
Ferraro sent her video of the aftermath. At first she couldn’t watch it. An hour later she was replaying it on a loop, triaging which pieces could be saved. More than half the works had already sold before the attack, according to Laika. Prices ranged from €1,500 to €4,000 (roughly $1,600 to $4,400), Ferraro said. A few of those collectors have asked for partial restoration: bring back the central figures, leave the black paint in the background.
So the vandals are now, technically, collaborators.
Laika says she has been getting threats over email and Instagram for a while, mostly from people she describes as “fascists and Zionists.” Between that and the torn posters, she’d braced for trouble on the street, out pasting with her crew in masks. Not in a gallery, in the middle of the afternoon, with someone standing there.
She’s rethinking security for her public appearances, but she’s more worried about everyone around her. She signed up for the risk. The people around her didn’t. She wears a mask. Ferraro doesn’t.
Rosso20sette didn’t close. The damaged works are still hanging, next to photos of how they looked before. The show runs through November 14. Closing it, Ferraro told ANIMAL, would have handed the attackers what they wanted. “Those works today tell two stories: the one the artist wanted to tell and the one of what happened inside the gallery,” he said.
He won’t pretend he’s fine. “Being threatened in your own gallery is an experience you won’t easily forget,” he said. “I can’t know if they’ll return, but I don’t want to live or work in fear.”
As for the men in hoods, Laika figures they’ll come around to it eventually. “They will realize that they did me a favor,” she said. “I’m stronger. I’m more determined.”
Photos: Bucky Turco/ANIMALNewYork
