Draft:Angelo Capasso

Angelo Capasso (Rome, 1966) is an Italian art critic and writer, professor of History and Methodology of Art Criticism at the

Angelo Capasso
Angelo Capasso in 2024
Born	1966
Citizenship	Italian
Occupation(s)	art critic, writer

Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara.

Biography

Beginnings and career in art publishing

Angelo Capasso made his literary debut with a series of short stories on the magazine “Babele. Esperimenti creativi in lingue diverse” during the 1980s. He made his debut with art criticism with a text on Blue by director Derek Jarman, published first in the magazine Filmcritica (1993) and then on the magazine Cahiers d'Art (1994).

Capasso then became editor-in-chief of Cahiers d'Art, for which he would write until the year of its closure in 1996. In the same year he began collaborating with different magazines, including Segno and Tema Celeste. In 1998 he became correspondent for Italian contemporary art exhibitions on account of Tate Etc. (at the time Tate, the art magazine), produced by British association Tate. In the same year, in London art scene, he curated the project Absolut Cattelan, a collaboration between Maurizio Cattelan and Absolut Vodka. In 1998 he became director of RomArte (Rome).

Between 2006 and 2009, he co-directed, with Emanuela Nobile Mino, the Volume! Foundation, a foundation dedicated to site-specific contemporary art projects. Since 2009, appointed by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he is both curator and Scientific Committee member of the Farnesina Design Collection, owned directly by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For the Collection he curated in 2009 the traveling exhibitions dedicated to Italian design entitled "Colore e calore per la Collezione Farnesina Design".

Group exhibitions 1998-2006

Capasso opened his first group exhibition in 1998 on the theme of gender theories, “maestri/e” (with works by artists such as Flavio Favelli, Nan Goldin, Erwin Olaf and Andres Serrano) in Viterbo, Italy, on the occasion of the first art festival dedicated to Elizabethan theater.

In 2000 he curated the exhibition-event “Nottefonda” in Rome, an exhibition held entirely during nighttime featuring the works of numerous artists including Vettor Pisani, prominent Italian painter and playwright. Capasso then curated a series of exhibitions for Vettor Pisani: “Meglio un asino vivo che un artista morto” (Trevi Flash Art Museum, 2002), “Nostos, Nostalgia volo di ritorno” (Torre Guevara, Ischia, 2004) “Lady Madonna” (Fondazione Volume!, 2006).

In 2001 he curated in San Benedetto del Tronto “ABO The Arts of Criticism”, an exhibition on art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, founder of the Transavantgarde art movement. Later he will collaborate with Bonito Oliva for the conference dedicated to Italian art in the context of Michelangelo Pistoletto's “Terzo Paradiso” ("Third Paradise") with Italian singer Gianna Nannini, held between 2006 and 2008 first in Moscow then in Minsk.

In 2003 he curated the exhibition “Places of affection passage-landscape” on international contemporary art in the context of the international exhibition Europalia.Italia (during the Italian Presidency of the European Parliament). The exhibition presents Italian artists who lived in Europe and European artists who chose to live and work in Italy.

Commissioned to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the CGIL, one of the main Italian trade unions, in 2006 he curated the exhibition “Capolavoro” at the Palazzo di Primavera, in Terni, Italy.

Contemporary Chinese Art

Capasso is among the Italian critics most dedicated to the new wave of contemporary Chinese art. In 2008 he planned “Onda anomala” ("abnormal wave"), an exhibition in Trento, Italy on the new Chinese avant-garde in collaboration with German curator Martina Koppel-Yang, featuring contemporary Chinese artists such as Cao Fei, Yan Pei-Ming, Yang Jiechang, Wang Du. He was subsequently invited in 2009 to the first edition of the Forum on Chinese Contemporary Art, organized by the University of Chicago and the University of Beijing, where he proposed the idea of performativity (as opposed to the traditional idea of performance) in art. In 2011, he curated the exhibition of artist Xu Longsen at the Palazzo della Civiltà Romana in Rome, where shan shui, a large-scale landscape painting, was juxtaposed with the culture of the Roman Empire.

Works

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