Marina Apollonio Biography
Marina Apollonio (Trieste, 1940) is an Italian artist, considered one of the most representative figures of the international optical-kinetic movement. Daughter of the Umbrian theorist and art critic Apollonio and Fabiola Zannini, she grew up in a stimulating artistic environment. After completing his high school studies, he attended Professor Giuseppe Santomaso's painting courses at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and dedicated himself to industrial graphic design and interior architecture solutions. In 1962 he began his research on perception and visual communication. After working in Paris as a designer for an important architectural firm, in 1964 he returned to Italy and created his first metallic reliefs with alternating chromatic sequences and his first circular dynamics. He shares with other exponents of Optical Art the desire for a depersonalized art, in opposition to the concept of expressive abstraction. He uses modern industrial materials to create calculated structures that, in the viewer's vision, transform into dynamic and fluctuating spaces. It is in this period that he meets Getulio Alviani. He made his debut at the collective exhibition organized at the Il Chiodo Art Center in Palermo, winning first prize. Since 1965 it has been an integral part of the historical movements of Optical - Kinetic Art; gravitates around the N Group of Padua and the T Group of Milan, sharing both the aims of the research and the choice of materials. He exchanges his ideas with Getulio Alviani, Dadamaino and the other exponents of Azimuth, he knows GRAV, the Zero Group and Nova Tendenza very well, so much so that he participated in Nova Tendencija 3, an international exhibition held in the same year at the Galerija Suvremene Umjetnosti, Galleria d' Contemporary Art, Museum of Art, Zagreb. He is among the protagonists of the important exhibition Aktuel '65 at the Galerie Aktuel in Bern and, together with Getulio Alviani and Paolo Scheggi, of the exhibition Oeuvres Plastiques et Appliquèes at the Galerie Smith in Brussels. Since 1975 he has created works based on the orthogonal relationship of coloured, vertical and horizontal parallel lines on a black background. In 1977 she was commissioned to create a miniature work for Herbert Distel's Museum of drawers, a collection of five hundred works created by some well-known artists, such as Picasso, and others less well-known. In 1981 he began to dedicate himself to weaving, exhibiting his works at the Laboratorio Artivisive in Foggia and subsequently, in 1983, at the Morbide & Trame exhibitions, at the Civica Galleria d'Arte Contemporanea di Foggia and Testi Tessili, at the Il monte analogo bookshop in Rome. In 2007, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt commissioned the work Space with kinetic activation 1967-1971/2007, a ten-metre rotating disk, placed in the museum rotunda for the international Op Art exhibition, where she exhibited alongside the major exponents of Optical Art including Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, François Morellet, Julio Le Parc, Gianni Colombo, etc. Participate in the major international Optical art events: the Optic Nerve exhibition. Perceptual Art of the 1960s, at the Columbus Museum of Arts and Bit International [Nove] tendencije - Computer und visuelle Forschung. Zagreb 1961-1973, at the Neue Galerie in Graz. In 2013 she was invited to the exhibitions Dynamo at the Grand Palais in Paris and Percezione - Arte Programmata y Cinética at the MACBA in Buenos Aires and was present at the exhibition The Art of Light and Movement in the Marli Hoppe-RitterCollection at the Museum Ritter in Waldenbuch, Germany.
