Sofia Cacciapaglia (Italy)

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 Pavilion for the 54° International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.

The women in Sofia’s practice call both to each other and to us - dancing, seducing, celebrating, resting, and perhaps, if we are lucky, enchanting us, and rebuilding their surroundings into a more hopeful future. As Jenny Hval describes in her novel Girls Against God, “We pull the structures down with us,” (Hval 2020, loc. 564). Cacciapaglia’s work and her community of women so embedded in the idea of apparition, exist outside of the boundaries of the social structure, of time, and of material. They are not images we are meant to intellectually engage with. They are alive.

— Emma Saperstein, Chief Curator and Director of Education, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art

Cacciapaglia has spent each summer of her life in her family home in Sicily. She finds inspiration in the ancient mosaics of the Villa Romana del Casale near the Sicilian town of Piazza Armerina. Cacciapaglia’s figurative works suggest the villa’s renowned mosaic of female athletes. Cacciapaglia’s women inhabit a nonspecific, timeless space and the weightless gestures of their arms and hands recall the Maidens’. In both instances, the figures demonstrate an ethereal quality through a lightness achieved in tone and movement. Cacciapaglia speaks of Sicily’s “blinding and total light of midday, which moves the viewer,” and becomes strikingly present in her work.

— Lana Meador, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, San Antonio Museum of Art

Sofia Cacciapaglia is a bit of an alchemist. She transforms cardboard boxes and packaging paper—inexpensive materials meant to protect precious goods during transit—into prized possessions unto themselves. Take, for instance, Affresco su Cartone series in which cardboard is repurposed into a soaring triptych. Flattened out, the boxes’ volume has been eliminated and forms elongated into three vertical supports on which Cacciapaglia has applied acrylic paint in a series of dynamic daubs and strokes. The effect is an idyllic flower garden reverberating with color and light. While her painterly approach may call to mind Monet’s impressionistic gardens, Cacciapaglia’s work is deeply rooted in her Italian heritage evoking ancient Roman wall painting as much as the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s.

— Lana Meador, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, San Antonio Museum of Art

Sofia Cacciapaglia’s home studio in Italy is situated in a neighborhood where there are many shops, whose owners often leave their boxes in the courtyard nearby. Cacciapaglia, who already had a vibrant painting practice on canvas, started taking these pieces of cardboard into her studio and using them as material to paint on. This new material to Cacciapaglia was much more urgent and gestural than the slower and methodological approach she has in her oil paintings on canvas. It is not the only way that this urgency appears in Cacciapaglia’s practice. The women in her paintings appear with an immediacy - belonging both to every era, and to none, like an apparition of an angel or spirit.

— Emma Saperstein, Chief Curator and Director of Education, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art