Franco Angeli

Giuseppe Franco Angeli was born in Rome in May 1935, in the San Lorenzo district. He took his surname from his mother Erminia Angeli.

When he was 9 years old, his father Gennaro died and Franco began working as a warehouseman, then as a coachbuilder and finally as an upholsterer, especially the latter experience with textiles would have an influence on his artistic career.

In 1957, he began painting, without training, in Orvieto, exorcising a deep malaise and ‘looking for a way not to be alone’.

Franco Angeli and Alberto Burri

The meeting with the sculptor Edgardo Mannucci in Rome was important because Mannucci himself was in contact with the painter Alberto Burri whose work Franco Angeli was fascinated by and whose painting was influenced towards an informal art with strong materiality of components.

His membership of the Italian Communist Party further marked his painting towards strong colours and memory, such as these ‘wounds from which I removed the pieces of a bandage’.

The Sixties

In 1959 he exhibited for the first time at the Galleria La Salita. In 1960, again at La Salita, his first solo exhibition. Cesare Vivaldi spoke of those paintings as ‘tears of things’. Also, in 1960 at La Salita Gallery, Angeli participated in another group exhibition ‘5 painters’ curated by Pierre Restany. In 1962 he was at the Galleria Comunale d’arte moderna in Bologna, and in February 1963 he exhibited at ’13 painters’ in Rome at Galleria La Tartaruga.  In 1963, he exhibited in Paris at Gallery J with other artists, including Christo, an exhibition also curated by Restany. He subsequently held a solo exhibition at Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome.

Beyond informal art for a political art

In 1963 he combined painting and manuscripts. For a solo exhibition in Milan at the Galleria dell’Ariete, he presented ideological urban symbols of Rome – I frammenti capitolini. In June 1964 he exhibited for the first time at the Venice Biennale. In 1965 he exhibited in Rome, in the autumn in Paris, then in Verona and Cannes. Numerous other exhibitions followed in 1967 and 1968.

He made his first full-length film, ‘Days of Reading’, with which he participated in the 9th São Paulo Art Biennale.

Between 1968 and 1970, Franco Angeli focused on his political concerns, in particular Vietnam, which prompted him to produce works such as ‘American University’ and ‘Protest March’. In the 1970s again, with ‘Popular Song of the Andes’ (after the coup d’état in Chile in ’73), he returned to the war in Vietnam with ‘Eurasian Anonymous’ and ‘Comrades’ after the military coup in Greece.

In 1975, he met his life partner, Livia Lancellotti.

The 1980s saw him more committed to the theme of figuration, with works depicting deserted squares and marionettes, a sort of ironic self-portraits, aspects that were increasingly present in the last phase of his artistic production.

He died in Rome on 12 November 1988.