1970s Lia Crippa Signed Italian Etching. Printed on thick matte paper in Italy. Numbered 15/30 and hand signed by the artist. GZ paper stamp embossed. Design featuring abstract floral scene in magnificent rich green hue.

Etched details which are even more beautiful in person. Aquatint Etching with Carborundum. Aquatint is an etching process in which tone is created by treating a plate with fine particles of acid resistant material (like powder resin) and then placing the plate in an acid bath. The acid bites into the plate between the grains of resin and when printed, the mass of tiny spots produces a textured area with tonal effects similar to watercolor wash. 

Size: 27.3"H x 19.5"W. 

Condition: Excellent condition with faint age spot on the bottom right, which can be covered when framing if desired.

About the Artist - Lia Crippa

Lia Crippa (1922–2003) was an Italian painter born in Monza, sister of the well-known artist Roberto Crippa. She lived and worked mainly in Milan, where she moved in artistic circles that included Lucio Fontana, and she also kept a second home in Santa Margherita Ligure, where she would retreat for inspiration and quiet. Her career unfolded chiefly between the 1960s and 1980s, a period during which she held numerous solo and group exhibitions. Notable among these were a 1973 show at the Galleria d'Arte Cortina in Milan and "La Comédie Humaine" in 1986 at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, accompanied by a catalogue with an introduction by critic Franco Passoni. Earlier, in 1970, the Galleria d'Arte Cavour published a catalogue of her work featuring texts by Michel Tapié, Franco Passoni, and André Verdet - a sign of the serious critical attention she attracted during her lifetime. She was later honored with the Ambrogino d'Oro, one of the city of Milan's civic awards.

Crippa was known as a vivid, idea-driven personality with an unconventional working method: she preferred to paint in dim light, with the canvas laid flat rather than mounted upright on an easel. She worked across canvas and mounted board, mixing media with oil paint, and treated color as the emotional core of her work - luminous, vibrant, and expressive. Stylistically her paintings moved between abstraction and stylized natural imagery, and her output is generally described as falling into two main threads: floral compositions, rendered figuratively in bright, lively color, and a series of "totems" more symbolic, structurally driven works that reflected a deeper, more introspective strand of her artistic research.

Despite being embedded in a lively artistic community and surrounded by friends, those close to her described a certain solitude in Crippa's life, one that seems to have been bound up with the intensity of her creative process, since she was said to lose herself completely in her work, cut off from her surroundings while painting. That combination of sociability and inward retreat, paired with her sustained critical recognition through the '70s and '80s, marks her as a distinctive, if still somewhat under-recognized, figure of postwar Italian painting.