FRANCA SCHEGGI DALL’ACQUA
Franca Scheggi Dall'Acqua was born in Milan in 1941.
She studied architecture and design.
In 1964, she met Paolo Scheggi Merlini and they married the same year. Together with Scheggi until 1971, the year of his untimely death, Franca gave him a daughter, Cosima Ondosa Scheggi Serenissima, in 1970.
On the artist's death, Franca took over his full cultural and artistic legacy. She curated the first anthological exhibition dedicated to him in 1976, at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna. From the 1980s to 2013, the year in which the Associazione Archivio Paolo Scheggi was founded, she continued to promote and protect her husband's work, coordinating anthological exhibitions and supporting important projects including the reconstruction of the Plastic Interchamber in 2007, donated to the Centro per le arti contemporanee "Luigi Pecci" in Prato in 2013. At the same time, Franca lends her voice to selected interviews and patiently follows master's and doctorate theses that have been awarded with honours and have resulted in important publications.
In the same year, she founded with her daughter Cosima the Associazione Archivio Paolo Scheggi, whose most important scientific activity is the publication, in 2016, of the Catalogue raisonné of the artist's work, edited by Luca Massimo Barbero and coordinated by Ilaria Bignotti.
Among the exhibitions carefully followed by Franca, the tribute to Paolo Scheggi in the context of the exhibition POSTWAR. Protagonisti italiani, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero at the Guggenheim Collection in Venice, from 23 February to 15 April 2013; shortly afterwards, from 24 March to 30 June, the exhibition dedicated to the extension of the work into the environment, Paolo Scheggi. Intercamera plastica e altre storie, held at the Centro Pecci in Prato and curated by Stefano Pezzato.
This was followed by the reconstruction of Paolo Scheggi's participation with four large Intersuperfici at the 1966 Venice Biennale, on the occasion of Art Basel in June 2015, for Tornabuoni Art, a gallery that represents the artist internationally; in October of the same year, the exhibition dedicated to Scheggi and the word, from poetry to performance, at Tornabuoni Art's Paris venue.
In 2018, from 30 January to 31 March, the three-voice exhibition where Scheggi's Interfiore was put in dialogue with the research of artists from the new generation, Joanie Lemercier and *fuse, at Spazio Arte CUBO condividere cultura, Unipol Group's business museum, in Bologna. This experimental choice to verify the persistence of Scheggi's language in current artists had also been made on the occasion of the bi-personal exhibition Paolo Scheggi-Lucy Skaer, at Cortesi Gallery in Lugano, in April-May 2014.
Recently, Franca had supervised the planning of Scheggi's first anthological exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London, entitled Paolo Scheggi: In Depth, held from 3 July to 15 September 2019, and from 5 September to 11 October of the same year the reconstruction of the mythical performance Oplà-stick, a passion according to Paolo Scheggi from 1969, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and interpreted by the theatre collective BADco., a performance that has been touring Rijeka (Rijeka), Capital of Culture 2020, since the end of October of the same year.
