Draft:Angelo Capasso

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Angelo Capasso in 2024

Angelo Capasso (Rome, 1966) is an Italian art critic and essayist, and a professor of History and Methodology of Art Criticism at the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara.

Biografy

Beginnings and Career in Art Publishing

Angelo Capasso made his literary debut with several short stories published in the magazine Babele, experimenting with creative writing in different languages in the late 1980s. He began his career in art criticism with a text on Blue by director Derek Jarman, first published in the magazine Filmcritica (1993) and later in the Italian edition of Cahiers d’Art (1994), where he became editor-in-chief and continued to write until the magazine closed in 1996. In the same year, he began collaborating with various other magazines, including Segno and Tema celeste. In 1998, he became a correspondent for Italian contemporary art exhibitions for Tate Etc. (then Tate, the art magazine), the art magazine published by the British Tate organization. Within the London art scene, he also curated the Absolut Cattelan project, a collaboration between Maurizio Cattelan and Absolut Vodka.

In 1998, he was appointed editorial director of RomArte in Rome. From 2007 to 2009, also in Rome, he served as co-director of the Fondazione Volume!. In 2009, appointed by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he became co-curator of the Farnesina Design Collection, also serving as a member of its Scientific Committee; for the collection, he curated the traveling exhibitions dedicated to Italian design titled Color and Warmth for the Farnesina Design Collection. Between 2006 and 2009, he was co-director, alongside Emanuela Nobile Mino, of Fondazione Volume!, a foundation dedicated to contemporary art projects executed in site-specific modalities.

Group Exhibitions 1998–2006

Capasso organized his first group exhibition in 1998 on the theme of gender theories, titled “maestri/e,” featuring works by artists such as Flavio Favelli, Nan Goldin, Erwin Olaf, and Andres Serrano, in Viterbo during the first festival dedicated to Elizabethan theater.

In 2000, he curated the event-exhibition Nottefonda in Rome, a night-time exhibition showcasing works by numerous artists, including Vettor Pisani, for whom Capasso would later organize a series of exhibitions: Better a Live Donkey than a Dead Artist (Trevi Flash Art Museum, 2002), Nostos, Nostalgia volo di ritorno (Torre Guevara, Ischia, 2004), and Lady Madonna (Fondazione Volume!, 2006).

In 2001, he curated ABO Le arti della critica in San Benedetto del Tronto, an exhibition dedicated to the critic Achille Bonito Oliva. He later collaborated with Bonito Oliva for a conference on Italian art in the context of the two editions of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Terzo Paradiso with Gianna Nannini, held between 2006 and 2008, first in Moscow and then in Minsk.

In 2003, he curated the exhibition Luoghi d’affezione passaggio-paesaggio on international contemporary art within the framework of the Europalia.Italia international festival (during the Italian Presidency of the European Parliament). The exhibition focused on European artists who had lived outside Italy and those who had chosen to work in Italy from abroad.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CGIL, he organized the exhibition Capolavoro (2006) at Palazzo di Primavera.

Contemporary Chinese Art

Capasso is among the Italian critics who have most focused on the new wave of contemporary Chinese art. In 2008, he organized Onda anomala, an exhibition in Trento on the new Chinese avant-garde, in collaboration with German curator Martina Koppel-Yang. He was subsequently invited in 2009 to the first edition of the Forum on Chinese Contemporary Art, organized by the University of Chicago and Peking University, where he introduced the concept of performativity (as opposed to the traditional idea of performance) in art. In 2011, he curated an exhibition of the artist Xu Longsen at the Palazzo della Civiltà Romana in Rome, where large-scale Shan shui landscape paintings were juxtaposed with the culture of the Roman Empire.

Works

• Nottefonda. Rituali del buio, Edizioni ZowArt, Roma 2000
• ABO. Le arti della critica, Skira, Milano 2001
• AA. L’arte per l’arte, MME, Roma 2002
• Ombre e fantasmi, Monti, Roma 2004
• Collezione privata, Edizioni DMG, Roma 2006
• Opere d’arte a parole, Meltemi, Roma 2007
• Satoshi Hirose. Viaggio, Silvana Editoriale, Milano 2008
• L’orlo del vuoto. Vita arte e morte di Luigi Di Sarro, Skira, Milano 2008
• Sadiesfaction. Seduzione, Economia, Arte, DuePunti, Palermo 2011
• Naturans. Il paesaggio nell’arte contemporanea, Skira, Milano 2018
• Sortir Du Champ, Silvana Editoriale, Milano 2021
• Cosa dire. Manuale di critica d’arte, Grenelle, Potenza 2024

References

1. Absolut Ads, on www.absolutad.com.
2. Editorial staff, Fino al 18.VI.2001 | ABO: le arti della critica | San Benedetto del Tronto, Palazzo Piacentini e Palazzina Azzurra, exibart.com, May 8, 2001. Accessed July 18, 2024.
3. Il Terzo Paradiso, Moscow: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto. Accessed July 18, 2024.
4. Maria Cristina Bastante, Italiani a Bruxelles, exibart.com, November 11, 2003. Accessed July 18, 2024.
5. Luoghi d’affezione Hotel de Ville Bruxelles, 1995–2015.undo.net. Accessed July 18, 2024.
6. Capolavoro – Terni, Palazzo di Primavera (PDF), umbriaearte.it.
7. Asia Art Archive, Abnormal Wave, aaa.org.hk. Accessed July 18, 2024.
8. Asia Art Archive, What is Chinese Contemporary Art? The Collection of Essays of 2009 Beijing International Conference on Art Theory & Criticism, aaa.org.hk. Accessed August 5, 2024.
9. Xu Longsen, Museo Civiltà Romana, museociviltaromana.it.