Francesca Virginia Coppola (Rome, 1981) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Rome, Italy, and Los Angeles, CA. Her work unfolds at the crossroads of visual art and ecology, rooted in an exploration of existence and materiality.

She uses found elements including barks, branches, seeds, rocks and their extracted pigments to explore the correlation of time, human beings, organic and inorganic matter. In doing so, she embraces installation, assemblage, and soil/tree ‘rubbings’ – a technique she developed to capture her situated relationship with the environment.

Coppola’s background in zooanthropology and canine cognitive ethology informs her non-anthropocentric presentation of nature and human actions as parallel phenomena. Human intervention—whether art or culture— is viewed as a natural occurrence, equal to any other in the environment.

A core concept in her practice is the investigation of existence as a fundamental act of creation. Stripped of superstructures, the work is anchored in an elemental relationship between the human body and the environment. The essential gestures that compose her site-specific and process-based works reveal the concept of the very act of existing itself—within space and time—as the ultimate agent of creation and the expression of interaction with other organic bodies.

Through the use of raw materials and tactile practices, she creates works that emerge directly from her encounters with specific places, manifesting as records of presence, time, and process. When conceiving her exhibitions, she engages with the surroundings of the venues. This reflects in her titles, where scientific nomenclature, time and geographical references indicate where the materials are gathered. These fragments of reality are transitional objects bridging nature as a primal level of existence to the artist’s inner thinking.

Coppola’s empathy towards landscape, animals, and plants manifests in her thoughtful and subtle gestures aiming at disclosing the intrinsic poetry and elegiac existence of these beings while establishing intimate yet transversal narratives extending through time and space. 

Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Silkeborg Bad Art Center (Denmark), Brand Library & Art Center (California, USA), and featured in MoMA’s In the Studio program (New York, USA). A finalist in the 19th edition of the Arte Laguna Prize (Venice, Italy), she has been awarded notable residencies, including The Wild: Artist in Residence (Ontario, Canada) and recently NAHR (Val Taleggio, Italy), where she experimented with the use of fire as a medium, deepening her investigation of ephemerality.