Portrait study-dancer

Lucia Simone was born in Perugia (IT) in 1986, where she began to study art and music. In 2010, she graduated from the Accademia Di Belle Arti in Rome, where in 2013 she successively completed painting and direct engraving. In 2009 she composed the original music for the short film “Love Conquers Mountains” by Fernanda Moneta. In 2012 she won a scholarship in painting as an assistant to Gianfranco Notargiacomo, who held the teaching post in painting at the Accademia Di Belle Arti in Rome. She was responsible for teaching basic art techniques. Her works are present in the Archive of the Italian Engravers of Bagnacavallo, in the Archive of the Aqui International Biennal for engraving, in the private collection Archanes 6 (Heraklion, Creta, GR), and in the Sixth Repertoire of Italian Engravers. She has won several awards including an artist residence, third Prize of the International FIG Bilbao, she has exhibited in various museums including MACRO La Pelanda (RM - IT), Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art, and prestigious venues such as Palazzo Montecitorio and Palazzo Vecchio for the Premio Firenze. A solo exhibition of particular importance was “Uncanny” at the Interzone gallery (RM - IT) where the observer was led to face his own weaknesses by looking at digital and pictorial work which include disturbing content wrapped in a seemingly comforting representation. This research developed into “Consumed Reality” at Fondamenta gallery, which was covered in depth in the Inside Art Magazine of December 2018. An artist residence at the MACRO (Museo Arte Contemporanea Roma) , includes live painting and an exhibition of her works in one of the museum’s ateliers (December 2 - 9, 2019). Gian Ruggero Manzoni, Cecilia Casorati and Viola Di Grado have written critical texts about her work. She lives and works in Rome

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

As the artist declared:

"It starts from my need to develop a language capable of expressing complex mental and emotional states. I use the suggestive power of images and, more generally, the media I find most suitable to express my thought in a specific context. I basically collect vintage photos, chosen for their evocative power,or advertising poster from the 1950s, and then I rewrite their meaning using digital collage. Eventually, but not necessarily, I paint canvases of the results I get by deforming and scratching the subjects’ faces. The perception of mystery or magic is more related to the meaning of Das Unheimliche, the Uncanny, my aim is to break the taboo of unsettling appearance, because what unsettles – and deceives – me is my being involuntarily drawn to it: ‘The Uncanny is a kind of fright which goes back to something we’ve known for a long time, to what’s familiar to us’, as Sigmund Freud wrote in 1919 in his The Uncanny."