Francesca Virginia Coppola (1981) is an Italian multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in a forest area on the outskirts of Rome, Italy. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma in 2007 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Personal and intimate, yet universal in its relevance, her work emerges from a constant inner research about the meaning of life. Through this journey,  it explores fundamental themes such as time, immanence, authenticity, the relationship with nature, and more recently grief and loss. From her varied approaches of making art, Francesca Virginia Coppola’s work ranges from the context of outdoor site-specific installations to intimate works on paper or canvas, as well as drawings, collage, assemblage, video, and found objects.

Urged from an early age by philosophical inquiries, in her initial work Francesca deals with necessity to research a reality built by humans and perceived as artificial and uneasy. The discomfort with which she perceived urban reality, led her to seek a more “primitive” and natural relationship with the world. In the last decade, Francesca has been living in close contact with nature. This has shaped her view of reality and her artistic research as well, leading to the current theme of her art: the relationship between nature and the human being. ‘My work is meant to evoke a poetic yet strong image of what we are as humans on this earth. I like to think of works of art as pieces of reality, helping us to reflect on the meaning of life,’ she explains. The visual language she uses serves as the conceptual key of the work: the essentiality of the techniques and the materials is coherent with concepts of simplicity and immanence: ‘I would like to transmit visual and mental intensity through the absence of artificial expressions’. She often creates without the use of any artificial gear; using only paper, organic elements, and her hands.

Grass, soil, barks, found branches, organic pigments and all sorts of natural elements gathered in her daily hikes in the forest compose her assemblages, drawings, and collages. In her work natural elements are equally shown without any human modifications as well as with the artist’s interventions, which are not intended as different works of art, but as an expression of human creation as a natural phenomenon itself. ‘I hope that isolating and framing the organic materials in my artworks can offer an occasion to observe and reveal the intrinsic beauty found in nature.’