ACERVO
COPELLO NORERO
The research project presented below as a digital repository is dedicated to cohesively and chronologically organizing both the works and the documentary material produced by the visual artist and performer Francisco Copello Norero (Santiago de Chile, 1938 - 2006) that remained in the hands of the Copello Norero family after his death.
This material, which today forms part of the Copello Norero Collection, is composed of paintings, drawings, collages, photographs, audio and video tapes, manuscripts, books, magazines, exhibition catalogs and objects, among others, which were preserved as unpublished because they had not previously been available to the public.
The research aims to recognize, identify, catalog, preserve, and publish the documents, in order to make them known to diverse audiences, adding to the purpose of responding to the current need to rescue and highlight the archives, in the understanding that it is essential to preserve the memory of Chilean artists and their legacy to make it available to communities that can study them and generate new readings that contribute to the enrichment of the History of Art in Chile.
Die Ecke
TIMELINE
The research is explained through a timeline organized by chronological periods, with each period accompanied by a narrative resulting from the research that serves as context to situate all the material found, including works, publications, and records of events carried out during the indicated time period.
It is important to note that the decision was made to "triangulate" the material from the Copello Norero Collection with the national collections that safeguard original documentary material donated during Francisco Copello's lifetime in order to generate critical cross-sections between documentary collections: written documentary material belonging to the CeDOC Center for Documentation of Visual Arts (Cerrillos National Center for Contemporary Art) and audiovisual material -records of performances, interviews, others- available in the online viewer of the National Museum of Fine Arts.
- Con Inés Osella, Florencia
- Vistas de Florencia
- Documentos Academia Bellas Artes Florencia
- Grabados en Nueva York
- Studio 69 / Studio F
- The Last Supper
- The Printer
- Sin título
- Pieza para Locos
- XII Bienal de Sao Paulo
- Calendario
- Rosas
- A star is born
- Galleria Diagramma
- El Mimo y la Bandera
- Gioconda
- Serie Las Islas Encantadas
- Y muere glorioso el patriota
- Disegni delle Isole Galápagos
- Silvio Wolff
- Giuseppe Pino
- Crucifixión
- Modelo Academia Ligure
- Omaggio a Neruda
- Estrella Reina Mártir
- The Fringe Festival '79
- The Bride of America
- Seduction
- Rheinbeck
- Serie Circo
- Serie Cubos
- Serie Principito
- Serie Máscaras
- Serie Retratos
- American Mime Theater
- Times & Life of Atahualpa
- Vistas de Rio
- Cosmologies
- Collages The Last Supper
- Collages El Mimo y la Bandera
- Collages The Bride of America
- Collages Casta Diva
- Grabados Casta Diva
- Collages y grabado sin título
- Memories
- The Printshop Training
- Amazonía
- Fotografías sin título tomadas por Rainer Fetting
- Collage Figuras de Agua
- El perro de Lichtenstein
- Picabia
- Técnica mixta sin título
- Serie Volcanes
- Africus Bienal de Johannesburg, MAC
- Internacional de Gráfica Faber Castell, MAC
- Collages Francisco Copello, CCLC
- Huellas, MAC
- Pinturas objetuales
- Francisco Copello, Posada del Corregidor
- Razones de Familia, Posada del Corregidor
- Arte reciente en Santiago de Chile, Galería Posada del Corregidor
- Autorretrato
- Ningún artista ve las cosas como son...
- Primer Encuentro de Artes Emergentes
- Descubriendo el Arte
- Performance sin identificar, Chile
- Sesión fotográfica en casa, Chile
- Revista Lat.33 Septiembre
- Héroe, policía de Nueva York
- Fragile
- Copello, MAC Valdivia
- Lanzamiento Fotográfia de Performance
- Ejercicios sobre la Memoria, Pinacoteca U. Concepción
- Sobre el Arcoíris, Galería Cecilia Palma
- Revista Ambientes "La vida es un sueño"
- El Día de los Locos, 11-S-1973, U. Arcis
- Serie Poesía técnica mixta
- Revista Paula "Copello Technicolor"
- Lo mejor de Copello, U. de Talca
- Revista Arte Al Límite "El rey sin corona"
- Revista Más Deco "Performance by Frank Copello in the 80s"
- XI Bienal de Berlín
- Sandro Chia
- Keith Haring
- Mark Kostabi
- Rainer Fetting
BIOGRAPHY OF FRANCISCO COPELLO
Francisco Copello Norero was born in Santiago, Chile, on May 21, 1938, to Italian immigrant parents. During his childhood, he studied at the Italian School; later, he briefly studied Law and subsequently worked for several years at his father's "Bandera" noodle factory.
In 1962, he went to Italy to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence until 1966, where he graduated with a degree in Painting. At the end of 1966, he married American socialite Susan Stevenson and they moved to the United States, where, through his wife's family connections, he came to work at the Whitney Museum and met several contemporary artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.
Soon, in 1967, Copello moved to New York City to specialize in printmaking at the Pratts Graphics Center, where his teachers included the Latino artists Luis Camnitzer and Roberto Delamónica, and Michael Knigin, one of the founders of Chiron Press, one of the most important printing houses of the time in the production of Pop Art. He was an assistant and collaborator of Michael Knigin during the establishment of his new private printmaking workshop. After a year of study at the Pratts Graphics Center, he earned the title of Master Printer and established his own studio-workshop with the musician Fernando Torm—called Studio F or Studio 69 interchangeably—a space dedicated to the development of printmaking, music, and dance.
Between 1969 and 1972, Copello began his journey into the performing arts, participating in the dance troupe of choreographer Laura Dean and Robert Wilson's Hoffman School of Byrds theater company, where he took part in a preliminary version of the play K.A. Mountain and Gardenia Terrace, performed on several floors of a New York building. In 1969, Copello created his first body art piece, "The Last Supper," a photo-performance documented by Fernando Torm, consisting of tableaux vivants of various poses from Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, created in his studio.
In late 1972, Copello returned to live in Chile with the aim of expanding his body art in his native country. He undertook two projects: a photo-performance titled “Calendar” recorded by Luis Poirot, and a live performance titled “Piece for Madmen”—a representation of a painting of an asylum by Francisco de Goya—to be performed at the National Museum of Fine Arts on September 12, 1973. Both works were cut short as a result of the coup d'état of September 11.
Copello soon left the country, taking advantage of an invitation to participate in the Chilean delegation to the XII São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. After his participation in the biennial, Copello returned to the U.S. and completed the series of images that make up his "Calendar" with the young photographer Wren de Antonio, and then settled for a year in Berkeley, California, with his friend Claudio Naranjo.
In 1975, Copello settled in Milan, Italy, to expand and deepen the development of body art. That year, he held an exhibition of his prints at Luciano Inga-Pin's Galleria Diagramma, where he performed live wearing a feathered headdress, which was photographed on site by photographer Giovanna Dal Magro.
This encounter led to an artistic relationship spanning more than a decade; among their collaborations, the photo-performance “The Mime and the Flag,” created in Dal Magro's photography studio, stands out. For a decade, Copello resided in Italy, living in various cities in the Liguria region, where he created numerous photo-performances with prominent Italian photographers such as Giuseppe Pino, Maurizio Buscarino, and Giuliana Traverso; his photo-performances “A Mime Story” and “Pictures at an Exhibition” are particularly noteworthy. He also extensively developed his live performances, among which his “psychopatriotic” performances alluding to the political theme of the coup d'état and Chilean history (created between 1975 and 1979) are particularly significant, such as “The Departure,” “Homage to Neruda,” and “Esmeralda,” many of which toured various international festivals. Around 1980, his performance works moved away from politics and he began to explore new themes increasingly closer to the popular imagination, as expressed in the 1983 performance "Lana Turner". During his years in Italy, he worked as a teacher of body expression and body-art at Leona Laviscount's school, Patrizia Carratu's dance school and at the Campetto Sette Cultural Center.
In late 1983, Copello returned to live in New York City for the second time. Between 1984 and 1986, he worked as a master printer's assistant for his friend, the Italian Transavantgarde artist Sandro Chia, allowing him to connect with the contemporary art scene. During these years, he also developed his performance pieces "The Bride of America" and "Casta Diva." Between 1986 and 1987, Copello established his own printmaking workshop, the "Frank Copello Printshop," where he produced editions for artists such as Sandro Chia, Rainer Fetting, Mark Kostabi, and Keith Haring, among others. At this same workshop, he created several graphic series, including "Times & Life of Atahualpa" and "Cosmologies." Simultaneously, he joined Paul Curtis's American Mime Theater company.
After more than a decade, Copello returned to Chile permanently in 1996. In 1997, he received the Critics' Prize for his exhibitions "Huellas" at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Chile, and "Collages by Francisco Copello" at the Las Condes Cultural Corporation. In 1999, a retrospective exhibition of prints, photographs, installations, collages, and videos was held at the National Museum of Fine Arts; and he presented the exhibition and performance "Razones de Familia" at the Posada del Corregidor Gallery.
He wrote his memoirs entitled “Performance Photography: Autobiographical Analysis of My Performances” launched in 2002 at the National Museum of Fine Arts, under the publisher Ocholibros.
He continued to give exhibitions until his death on May 11, 2006.
Foto: Giovanna Dal Magro
DANCING WITH COPELLO
María Victoria Martínez Fadic,
researcher curator
My first encounter with the legacy of the artist and performer Francisco Copello was in 2014, while I was doing a professional internship at the Center for Visual Arts Documentation (CeDOC) when it was still located in the Palacio La Moneda Cultural Center. There, I began my specialization in the field of organizing and researching documentary archives of visual artists. In that context, I was given a box full of loose papers—a few paper clips and staples were the only devices that provided any semblance of organization—and I was asked to broadly identify, classify, and give an initial structure to this collection of documents, which had not been reviewed until then. These papers consisted of Copello's writings, typed documents, and mostly handwritten notes. Only then, having come to know this artist through this request, I soon discovered two things: 1) his biography is intricate and circular, he goes back and forth between places, builds characters and alter egos, has more than one personality, takes passages from his real life and then fictionalizes them; and 2) his handwriting is as convoluted and difficult to read as his own biography.
(...)
Francisco Copello Library
