Angela Occhipinti was born in Perugia, she lives and works in Milan.
After graduating in painting at the Fine Arts Academy of Florence, she specialised in graphic art and engraving, under the guidance of Pietro Parigi and Giuseppe Viviani. In her frequent travels abroad, she frequented and worked on Leblanc’s and Mourlot’s printing press and she came into contact with the greatest masters of modern art, including Picasso and Mirò. She made a thorough study with Hayter about the chemical processes in relation to the use of colours in the printing phases and acids in etching.
In Bologna she met Giorgio Morandi, whose engraving workshop she attended.
In 1958, having moved to Milan, she met Lucio Fontana, with whom she worked on experimental ceramic art at Martinotti’s workshop and engraving at the “Grafica Uno” of Giorgio Upiglio in Milan.
From 1961 to 1975 she frequented and worked at Giorgio Upiglio’s printing laboratory, where she developed her graphic experience while coming into contact with artists of the shot of De Chirico, Duchamp, Lam, Man Ray, Paladino, Seuphor, Vedova, etc. At this time she’s starting the long way of producing and publicising books and portfolios containing original prints carried out with all of the various engraving techniques.
She has engraved around 900 plates (wood engraving, etching, lithography and the new various technique copper-plate engraving). She has published 53 portfolios of engravings, introduced by critics and writers of international fame.
In 1972 Angela stays in Nepal and Burma, where she discovers the transparent and alchemic Nepalese and Burmese papers and finds her ideal support for the symbolic expressiveness of her art. She starts printing on this thin paper the copper matrixes performed with the techniques of the etching, aquatints and chisel. The ritual series of coloured kites of various measures, from cm 20 x 30; 50 x 70; up to 50 x 300, contains memories and forgetfulness among the past, the present and tension toward the future.
The Kites
…“I have found again in the myth of the kite the course of a brief history: eternally chooseing between the sleepless hope and the wise renouncement”…
For Angela Occhipinti the kites are symbols that contain the magic place where the most mysterious part of the deep self lies and their flights live in symbiosis with the rhythmic revolution of the stars and is measured with wind, space, clouds, tempest, lightning, meteors and rainbow in a continuous dialogue between sky and earth. At times they represent the theme of Arianna’s thread, understood as the spinning of the time and destiny that connects among them all moments of the existence, a thread that goes from the world of the darkness to that of the light as promise of conquest but also of return.
In her work, both pictorial and graphics, the theme of the labyrinth is recurrent, developed with the same sacredness of a “mandala”. Some times it is the initiation trip toward the hidden centre of the spirit, a walk inside the things and ourselves in the hope to reach the final intuition, where everything is simplified as for an illumination.
Another theme tight to the artist is the flight as desire of sublimation, of internal harmony and of overcoming of the limits, the myth of Icaro that renews him to the conquest of the sky as transcendence and creative strength.
Life journey
…”When I was a girl I collected geographical papers, I contemplated them spellbound many times and I lost myself in the wonder of exploration”…
The theme “of the trip” in her job is to be read as a run and recapture of the real herself, among a certain mastery of values and an estrangement from history.
For Angela Occhipinti the destinations of the trips, those true, are hidden behind the curve of the heart and the trip is the metaphor of life, she believes that each of us has in his blood those destinations and only through the trips one can find the measure of the distance that separates us from the unknown realities.
She has travelled and sojourned in India, Thailand, Bali, Japan, Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Tibet, Russia etc… She has visited whole Europe until Iceland, Africa, North and South America: Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, etc. but she has been spellbound above all by Argentina and Chile. She has visited the green expanses of the Pampa, the Valley of the Moon, the Peninsula of Valdes, where the penguins, the sea lions and the whales reproduce themselves, Patagonia, where every silence finds its voice: the whistle of the wind, the rustle of the grass, the rolling of dry bushes and the crackling shatter of great glaciers as the Perito Moreno. She has sailed on the Argentinean Lake populated by immense icebergs, arrived to the Earth of Fire and from Ushuaia she passed Cape Horn. She went up again along the Andes cordillera visiting Chile up to the desert of Atacama, to the Valley of the Moon and to the Gran Salar in Bolivia. She has visited the Pascua Island, called Rapa Nui, situated in the Pacific Ocean. These experiences were transformed in lifeblood for her art. She thinks that “the trip” is school of life and thought; it is also a mental recognition where every form takes origin and mysteriously disappears. Every trip becomes a sonorous, melancholy and contemplative sadness that is nearly translated in a language of signs and combinations of endless symbols. Everything becomes motive to transform her objects in findings of penetrating suggestion, that need that silence that is suitable to the intensity of life and memories. Every trip turns into a territory of concrete symbols, histories of gestures that connect painting and sculpture.
Angela Occhipinti succeeds in turning the memoirs of the trip into new icons, which are indistinct findings of reality. Every thing is subject and is mother of all images; the reality is transfigured in a poetic world where Angela Occhipinti affirms her own conception of the representation of colour and of light.
Since 1974 she has held the chair of engraving by the Academy of fine Arts of Macerata.
Since 1978 she has held the chair of engraving at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where she teaches the infinite and complex possibilities that can be obtained with wood-engraving (xilografia), etching (acquaforte), lithography and with all the new etching techniques.
She has held, upon invitation, courses about the techniques of engraving at the Universities of Chicago/USA; Stockholm/Sweden; Ankara, Istanbul/Turkey; Seoul, Bussan, Taegu/Korea; Tokyo/Japan, Rabat/Morocco; Tainan, Taipei/ Taiwan; Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Salta /Argentina; San Paolo /Brazil, etc..
She has held more than 90 personals in private and public galleries, and in museums in Europe, America and in the East.
She participated in a large number of group exhibitions
She has travelled and stayed a long time in the East: China, Tibet, Nepal, Burma, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and the USA.
She has participated, upon invitation in very important exhibitions, national and international biennials of painting and engraving, she has won numerous prizes.
Her works are exhibited in Italian and foreign private collections and museums.
Since 1979 she is co-ordinator of the international Erasmus office at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.
She has organised cultural events, written books and catalogues at Brera and abroad.
Her works are found:
in private collections and in museums of contemporary art in Italy and abroad. (San Francisco, San Diego, New York, Chicago/USA; Paris/France; Basel, Zurich/Switzerland; Copenhagen/Denmark; Stockholm/Sweden; Ankara, Istanbul/Turkey; Tokyo/Japan; Hong Kong/China; Taipei/Taiwan; Seoul/Korea; Casablanca, Istanbul/Morocco; Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Mendoza/Argentina; Montevideo/Uruguay; Santiago de Chile/Chile.
In public spaces for example a murals for the Terminal O’Hare of Chicago; sculptures in steel-cornet in Rebibbia, Rome; Sarule, Nuoro; the park museum in Viadana, Parma, etc…
Permanently at the following galleries Mandarin Fine Arts of Hong Kong; Indeco Gallery, Seoul, Korea; Zenith Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Spazio e Immagine, Milano, Italy; The Marconi Studio, Milano, Italy.