Sofia Cacciapaglia
Sofia Cacciapaglia was born in Ponte dell’Olio, Italy in 1983. She studied Fine Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milano where she graduated in 2006. After graduating she moved to New York in 2007 and had her first solo show at Industria SuperStudio, curated by photographer Fabrizio Ferri. Since then her work has been exhibited in galleries, foundations and museums in Italy, Switzerland, UK and China. In 2011 she became the youngest artist invited to the Italian Pavillon for the 54° International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.
In May 2019, she completed “Locus Amoenus,” her first large 360° installation that covered the walls of her studio with discarded cardboard boxes, which she transformed into a blossoming garden from floor to ceiling. This work brings with it an environmental message, giving the salvaged material a second life through the representation of nature and the rebirth of spring.
Cacciapaglia’s paintings are about women. In her large oil paintings, figures live in a suspended, metaphysical world without any reference to reality. The female figures – monumental but also light and ethereal– emerge from the dream world and inhabit an enchanted dimension: they are linked to each other through contact and gazes, by silent dialogues which are at the base of the compositional balance. These women are symbols of a primordial woman. Painted flowers are seen as an expression of happiness and sweetness, like the female bodies. They are often very large and out of scale and dominate the observer in a veiled, magical and immersive way.
In her paintings, Cacciapaglia I seeks lightness, harmony, the softness of shapes and colours, but above all mystery and silent contemplation. Apart from canvas, her favorite materials are simple ones such as cardboard and wrapping paper, because of their material structure and their neutral background color which gives the work a poetic vibration.