Artist of the day: Artist of the day, August 30: Franco Angeli, an Italian artist (#785)

Friday, August 30, 2019

Artist of the day, August 30: Franco Angeli, an Italian artist (#785)

Giuseppe Franco Angeli (1935 – 1988) was an Italian artist born in Rome. At the age of nine, following his father's death, Angeli began working as a storeroom boy. He also worked in a car body repair shop and was an upholsterer for a time. All these aspects of his early life affected his art career and style. Later in life, his style included the use of fabrics, templates, and scraps of cloth reminiscent of his past upholstery work.

From 1955 to 1957, Angeli was a self-taught artist. Though Angeli had never taken formal art classes, he began painting in 1957 during military service. While stationed in Rome, Angeli met a sculptor named Edgardo Mannucci. Mannucci had connections with a painter called Alberto Burri and Angeli found the painter's work fascinating. He adapted Burri’s techniques in his own work.

In March 1959, in a joint exhibition at the Galleria La Salita with Tano Festa and Giuseppe Uncini, Angeli exhibited his works for the first time. In January 1960, the Galleria La Salita gave him his first solo exhibit. His featured works consisted of veils of oil paints and nylon stockings stretched tight and covered with gauze.

In 1962, Angeli took part in "New Perspectives of Italian Painting", an exhibition at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna in Bologna. Angeli showed a series of works with symbols of power—initially swastikas, crosses, and half-moons. For instance.

Angeli's 1966 solo show Half Dollar exemplified his views on coins, which he saw as "the small symbolic world that he had been seeking for years. He had previously thought he had found this in bags, coats of arms and stone inscriptions." In October, the exhibition America America (Half Dollar) opened at the Galleria dell'Ariete with veiled, gilded eagles in hues of blue, white and red.

In 1968, Angeli's preoccupation with the Vietnam war and the student protests caused him to produce works such as Università Americana (American University; 1967) and Corteo (Protest March; 1968), which he created using the technique of social reportage. In the early 1970s, Angeli continued to focus on realistic political events. He produced a series of landscapes, a geometrically inspired work dedicated to the coup in Chile on 11 September 1973.

Angeli's deep interest in social and popular culture issues continued in his works throughout the 1980s, when he returned to the theme of war in a series of exotic landscapes with pyramids, obelisks, and airplanes that eventually became Esplosioni (Explosions; 1986). The stylized forms had spires, capitals, and deserted squares as if in "a grandiose, excruciating sense of excavation in which history and life resurface as perfect, intact geometric solids radiating fresh, fragrant pure colors—green, blue, and red." The theme of "puppets", which he developed in 1984, became a kind of self-portrait that foreshadowed the last stage of his life.

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