Franco Angeli

FRANCO ANGELI Rome, 1935 – Rome, 1988

After a beginning influenced by Burri’s art, Franco Angeli realizes works in which he alternate cotton gauze stained with paint on canvas, from which images and symbols of power and violence of the ancient and modern emerge, such as imperial eagles, swastikas, capitoline wolves ("Capitoline wolf head" of 1964), sickle and hammer, crosses and Dollars ("Half Dollar" 1966-1967), which emphasize the theme of memory. Angels becomes one of the main exponents of the famous Piazza del Popolo school, constituted by the same author together with Mario Schifano and Tano Festa, with whom he shares a long and fruitful path that will lead them to become the leading exponents of Italian Pop Art. They met by chance during the painting exhibition "Premio Cinecittà", in October 1960, promoted by PCI. Initially Angeli is influenced by the informal poetics, indeed he realizes monochrome and material canvases with dark tones, which then covers with nylon stockings torn and torn, symbolizing poverty and pain. The images of the tragic bombing of San Lorenzo, that has experienced during childhood, reappear in the first works: "the Matter for me is a fragment of this enormous tear that has swept Europe; my first paintings were like this, like a wound from which you remove pieces of bandage… where the blood is clotted but no longer a red stain- everything had to appear torn, broken. " In 1964 he took part in the Venice Biennale, an event that introduced artists of the American Pop Art in Italy; he also took part to the XI Quadrennale in Rome. In 1968 he created, for Il Teatro delle Mostre at the La Tartaruga Gallery, the installation ‘Opprimente’, a room in white with a lowered ceiling by a layer of polystyrene. During the 70’s he approached the themes of political commitment (such as the war in Vietnam), for then turning to figurative subjects such as moons, pyramids, airplanes, obelisks, testimony of his travels to the East. Lately, he starts a troubled relationship with Marina Ripa di Meana, who in her autobiography "Cocaina at Breakfas”, tells that she prostituted herself to procure cocaine to Angeli. He died of AIDS at the age of 53 in Rome, 1988.