La Serie Negra (The Black Series) is in many ways in stark contrast with most of Pemper’s work – no colour, no symbolism, the edge of the frame functioning more like a guillotine than a cage.

The art critic Ercole Lissardi has written of La Serie Negra, ‘Mutilated, the female body is a miserable and mute wreck. The limits of the frame cease to be merely a cage and become the edge of a guillotine. No head, no hands, no feet, only the trunk remains, waiting its turn. No longer the whole body, but the chopped-up, mutilated, stained, morphing, or simply monstrous body. The gaze of shame takes in the obscene soils, scratches, and smears the genitalia. Here we have the sense that what is missing from this body has disappeared – it fell, rolled, was lost, ended up in some garbage dump.’