Marina Apollonio

Marina Apollonio (born 12 November 1940) is an Italian painter and optical artist. She lives and works in Padua.

Work Apollonio was born in Trieste on 12 November 1940. She and her family moved to Venice when she was eight. In Venice she attended the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia.

In 1963, Apollonio produced her first work, Metal Reliefs with Alternate Color Sequences. She shared with other Op-Artists the interest in a depersonalized art, as opposite to Abstract Expressionism. She used industrial material in her process, creating dynamic and fluctuating environments in the user's perception.

In 1965, she became part of the international Op art movement, meeting and exhibiting with artists such as Gruppo N Padua; Gruppo T Milan; Getulio Alviani; Dadamaino and Azimuth Milan. In the same year she was invited to Nova Tendencija 3, an international group show held at the Galerija Suvremene Umjetnosti in Zagreb, to Aktuel ’65 at the Galerie Aktuel Bern and, together with Getulio Alviani and Paolo Scheggi, the Oeuvres Plastiques et Appliquèes at Galerie Smith in Brussels.

In 1975, Apollonio started making work based on the orthogonal relationship of parallel colored lines. In 1981 she expanded her practice to textiles, showing her works at the Laboratorio Artivisive Foggia and later, in 1983, at the exhibitions Morbide & Trame, at the Civica Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea in Foggia and Testi Tessili, at the Il Monte Analogo Library in Rome.

In 2007, she presented her work Spazio ad attivazione cinetica 1967-1971/2007, a 10-meter rotating disc, in the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt for the international show Op Art, where she was invited to exhibit together with Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, François Morellet, Julio Le Parc and Gianni Colombo. Her work has also been included in other Op art shows such as Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s, at the Columbus Museum of Art and - Computer und visuelle Forschung. Zagreb 1961-1973, at the Neue Galerie in Graz.

Her works have been reviewed by major news publications.