Franco Angeli

Giuseppe Franco Angeli (14 May 1935 – 12 November 1988) was an Italian artist.

Giuseppe Franco Angeli, the son of Erminia Angeli and Gennaro Gennarini, was born in Via dei Piceni in the Quartiere San Lorenzo district of Rome on May 14, 1935.

Like his brothers Omero and Othello, he took his mother's surname.

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.

Significantly, the aesthetic appeared in the subject of his painting E da una ferita scaturì la bellezza (Out of a Wound, Beauty Pours Forth; 1957), a work based on his memories of the bombing of San Lorenzo on 19 July 1943.

In his opinion, "matter for me is a fragment of this huge wound that devastated Europe; my first paintings were like that—like a wound from which I removed pieces of a bandage."

From this inherently political groundwork, Angeli's art found its own political charge.

His membership in the Italian Communist Party left marks in his initial approaches to painting.

These marks faded after he departed the party and drew closer to the more radical leftist and Maoist movements.

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 in Orvieto.

He justified his position by stating that "when you feel a deep malaise, you must look for a way not to be lonely. In short, you need to end an interest that will accompany you in life."

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, eventually borrowing the worn-out materiality of the Catrami (Tars).

In fact, the overall aesthetic of broken or ruined things became a key aspect of his 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.

The magazine Azimuth, founded by Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, featured him alongside Agostino Bonalumi, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Mimmo Rotella.

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.

A critic called Cesare Vivaldi described the effects of those evoked memories and absences as the "tears of things".

In 1960, Angeli took part in a collective show, again at the Galleria La Salita, entitled ''5 pittori.

Roma 60 (5 Painters. Rome 60).

The artists were Angeli, Festa, Lo Savio, Schifano, Uncini''; the show was curated by Pierre Restany.

For instance, the series entitled Cimiteri (Cemeteries) from the early 1960s used sequences of white crosses, which recall the power of Mauri's Schermi (Screens) and the Achrome (Achromes) by Manzoni, with whom he was in close contact.

As time went on, Angeli began to portray fragments of history and recorded traces of contemporary events.

Another work, Cuba (1960), drew from the United States embargo shortly after Fidel Castro's revolutionary forces had overthrown Batista's dictatorship.

One work, called O.A.S. (1961), alluded to the illegal paramilitary French organization during the Algerian war.

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.

Further, 25 Luglio (1963), which means 25 July, commemorates the fall of Italy's fascist regime in 1943.

In February 1963, Angeli showed his works along with a poem by Nanni Balestrini in an art exhibition of 13 pittori a Roma ("13 painters"), in the Galleria La Tartaruga.

In May of the same year, he presented at the Galerie J in Paris with Christo, Conner, Kudo, Todd, and Mauri in an exhibition curated by Restany - L'Object Pressenti.

Shortly afterward in June, he held a solo show at the Galleria La Tartaruga with a series of works focusing on the value of the symbol to acquire a different dimension.

This allowed him to go beyond the legacy of Arte informale.

In 1963, he collaborated with Mario Diacono and Elio Pagliarani to produce limited editions of books with handwritten texts and original drawings.

For a solo show at the Galleria dell'Ariete, Milan in January 1964, Angeli resorted to stereotypical ideological urban symbols emblematic of the rhetorical, celebratory character of Rome's archaeological ends.