Franca Pisani
Franca Pisani was born in Grosseto in 1956 into a family of artists: her grandmother Margherita was an embroidery designer for Queen Elena on the estate of San Rossore, in Tuscany, while her mother Lia is still a painter.
At the age of nine she attended the studio of the sculptor and painter Alessio Sozzi. After the artistic maturity she moved to Bologna to deepen her art studies at the D.A.M.S. faculty of letters, directed by Umberto Eco. You know and frequent Ketty La Rocca, an artist inserted in the panorama of the international artistic avant-gardes, whom you put in contact with Eugenio Miccini, founder of the “Visual Poetry” Movement. He brings the creation of Franca Pisani's 1976 Album Operazio to museums and universities all over the world.
In 1977 she was invited to the inauguration of the Center Pompidou in Paris by the director Pontus Hulten, as part of the large-scale program of cultural artistic exchange, how to exhibit in the museum spaces the Salon of Geltrude Stein, films, posters, performances and Visual Poetry ie Album Operazio.
From that moment on, she will start a long series of exhibitions, all in constant evolution, driven by the urgency of her to test her conceptual direction.
Franca Pisani exhibits in this way in the Hertziana Library in Munich (1977), at the University of Chicago (1999), in New York (2000), in Nice (2003), at the Maretti Arte Gallery in Montecarlo, in Nimes (2005), in the Marino Marini Museum (2008), at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid (2009), three times at the Venice Biennale (2009, 2011 and 2017), in the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin (2013), in the "Dietrofront" exhibition at the Royal Post Office degli Uffizi (2014), in the exhibition "Archeofuturo" in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto (2014), participates in "Settantotto Ritratti" in parchment for the book donnArchitettura (2014), donates his self-portrait to the Uffizi Gallery which becomes part of the relative, unique collection (2015), participates in the Milan Expo in the Tuscan pavilion and in the Monaco pavilion (2015), exhibits at the “Desdemona” exhibition in the Palazzo di Giustizia in Florence (2015).
In 2016 she exhibited in the cultural space Marzia Spatafora in Brescia with the exhibition "P.I.S.A.N.I." and, in the same year, she decides to leave Florence and move and work in Pietrasanta, in Versilia.
In 2017 he exhibited at the Exhibition of the Italian Cultural Institute in Vienna, at the personal exhibition in the historic Palazzina of Peschiera del Garda and participated for the third time in the Venice Biennale of art in the exhibition "Viva Arte Viva" in the Pavilion of the Republic of Syria. in the exhibition-homage to Palmira; then at the end of September he inaugurates his first solo show at the MACRO Testaccio in Rome, entitled “Archaeological Code - The recovery of beauty”.
In January 2018, on the occasion of the "Day of Remembrance", Franca Pisani donated a diptych painted on a Lyon canvas to the University of Padua in which she inserts a message in several languages (Hebrew, Italian and English) - the phrase Shoah, memory collective - to reaffirm the strength of memory; in May of the same year the diptych was placed in the Auditorium of the Botanical Garden of the Venetian city, the oldest in Italy.
In 2019, from April to October as part of the "Succisa virescit" exhibition, she is the author of two installations located within the museum area of the Abbey of Montecassino (FR), on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the bombing that destroyed it almost totally.
In January 2020 she is the protagonist of "Una vita", an anthological exhibition set up in the Monumental Complex of the Bourbon Prison in Avellino, with silk works from Lyon dedicated to Sandro Botticelli.
In March 2021 one of his sculptures - Archeosegno, exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale - became part of the temporary art collection of Villa Vittoria, which once housed the prestigious collection of painting, sculpture and applied art donated by the heirs of the Contini Bonacossi spouses at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in 1969.
In September of the same year she exhibited her works in the exhibition “Nel Sogno. Homage to Matilde Serao ", curated by Marina Guida, in the rooms of Castel dell’Ovo in Naples.
Last update: November 19, 2021