1977 Alessandra Bonelli Signed Italian Lithograph. Printed in Italy on matte paper. Hand signed by artist and labelled year 1977 and part 4/60 in a limited edition series. 

Size: 27”W x 19.5”H.

Condition: Excellent condition.

About the Artist - Alessandra Bonelli

Alessandra Bonelli was born in Milan in 1935 and trained at the Brera Academy, where she studied set design under Enrico Prampolini and Tito Varisco. She later taught at Brera and at the Academy’s set design program. Her early career was in theatre: between 1958 and 1960 she designed sets for Adam de la Halle’s Le Jeu de Robin et Marion at the Villa Olmo court theatre in Como, for La Bohème at the San Carlo in Naples, and for Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at Bayreuth. She also worked with set designer Piero Zuffi, and in 1989 she co-created the staging for the mimodrama Other Mesostics, based on John Cage and Italo Calvino, with Lucia Pescador.

Alongside theatre, she built a career as a painter. Her first solo show was in 1964 at Artecentro in Milan, run by Fiorella La Lumia, and she worked with that gallery until 1992. Her painting is held in public collections, such as the Lombardia Beni Culturali catalogue, which lists works attributed to her in Mantua. The catalogue entry lists her with the dates 1935 onward, though the record itself gives only basic information about the works. 

In 1976–77 she became one of the four founding members of the Gruppo Metamorfosi, with Gabriella Benedini, Lucia Pescador and Lucia Sterlocchi, a group formed on the initiative of critic Anty Pansera. The group was an example of four women artists resisting a cultural scene dominated by a few formations such as the Transavanguardia, and as an all-female collective it is studied as a case of women’s roles in Italian art of that period. Its first exhibition was held in 1977 at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, and the group showed in both public and private venues over the following years. More recently, Bonelli was included in the 2022 Como exhibition Astratte: Women and Abstraction in Italy 1930–2000, which presented 38 women artists. The exhibition was reviewed in Finestre sull’Arte in February 2022.