Luigi Rocca, the hyperrealist painter, was born near Udine, Italy, in 1952.

After attending Art high school, he moved to Turin, where he completed his artistic studies. Until 1980 the figurative art were the subject of his creations, but also landscapes fascinated him: he looked to the past, but with an eye to the present.

In 1980 he considered that the cycle of experiences – that had offered him the means to live – had come to an end. America, and in particular the United States, fascinated him. So, without losing sight of the Realism so loved, his painting became more actual.

In 1985, after only one exposition, that of Galleria Viotti in Torino, consecrated Luigi in his adoptive city as one of the most prestigious artists representing that much-discussed pictorial genre. Since that moment he started to exhibit in Portofino and at New York’s Art Expo, and in the successive years numerous solo shows were set up between New Orleans and San Francisco.

In 1996 Luigi returned to live in Venice and exhibited his artworks at his representing gallery, Melori & Rosenberg Art Gallery (today Ghetto Et Cetera Art Gallery), in Campo Ghetto Nuovo. Since then, in close collaboration with the Gallery, he has exhibited his works in personal exhibitions of great prestige and in traveling collectives exhibited in museums and foundations.

Harry Mensing has contributed to the development of Luigi Rocca’s career in recent years: since 2006 he has organized many solo exhibitions at his galleries in Munich, Hannover, Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg, and made him famous in Germany. The Arnot Galleries in New York exhibited his paintings with great success until its closure in 2020.

In 2022 Luigi Rocca has exhibited his artworks here at the Gallery in a double-personal exhibition with Donatella Chiara Bedello, his pupil, entitled “2 Painters in a Bubble”. In 2023 he has exhibited in a personal exhibition here at the gallery entitled “Looking for America”.

 

 

 

“Luigi Rocca reveals New York through a painting learned from the American Hyperrealists, who refined in the sixties a technique of reproduction on the verge of mimetic illusionism. In his paintings art and photography overlap as well and the artist considers the latter a means to rebuild the reality, without limiting the pleasure of painting freely.

Vibrations of colours and touches of light fray, in fact, his views, leaving our eye to reconstruct them, as of an impressionist painting or, paradoxically, a “pictorialist” photograph. It is actually from the city-scapes of the Impressionists of the end of the Nineteenth Century like Grimshaw, Eakins or Caillebotte, that Rocca has drawn the best lesson and reason for his creative force. His painting, like theirs, expresses a urban emotion breaking into with surprise and longing.”

Dr.ssa Elisa Capitanio
Translated by Dr.ssa Annalisa Moro

On his personal website www.luigirocca.com you can find more information.