Anna Comba

Name Anna

Surname Comba

Country Italia

Bio

Old-time divas, retired from the crowd, off the stage. Also for this reason the Turin artist Anna Comba will remain beyond time and space, the companion of those heroines of cinema that had made icons in his works. From the sixties he used the practice of collage to create works as pages of a personal and collective diary at the time, a single political and poetic text, made of images, clippings, painting, objects. Inside there was the chronicle of what was happening in the world, but it fell into an intimate daily life. The war in Vietnam, the social conquests and then, above all, the condition of the woman, a long journey of real and not only formal emancipation, that Anna Comba had in her heart. He was one of the protagonists of the Mec Art by Pierre Restany, close to the Nouveau Realism in his «putting» in the found things works to transform them into artistic elements. It was a way of talking about art as life. Over the years Comba had also given life to performances, for example at Porta Palazzo and on the River Po, and had created many artist books and installations. His gaze was always turned to the history of ordinary people, to the small women he witnessed through the images of Marilyn Monroe and Silvana Mangano, Hollywood and Neorealism, which well represented his spirit divided between reality and dream. The cinema was a perfect metaphor with which to tell all this, from the pages of the Grand Hotel magazine in Pasolini, from the frames: Bicycle thieves to those of the Best Youth. Many works remain of her, the regret of having waited in vain for a public anthological exhibition and the many memories shared with her husband Duilio Gambino in the historic gallery Overstudio in Piazza Vittorio.                                                                                                                                                                              OLGA GAMBARI