About
BIOGRAPHY
Veronica Agostini was born in Rome in 1971, into an old established Roman family with a long history of artists and professionals. In 1986 Veronica began her studies in Graphic Design at one of the most prestigious schools of fine art in Rome, the “Istituto d’Arte Silvio D’Amico”. In 1985, she spent a year sailing the Caribbean with her family. She was in close daily contact with the inhabitants of remote communities of the Antilles and subtropical regions of Mexico and Venezuela, absorbing the lush, vibrant cultures of the “New World”. In 1987 she crossed the Atlantic Ocean on a sailing boat with her dad, from Italy to the Caribbean Islands where she’ll come back in a later time.
In 1991 Veronica moved to London to immerse herself in yet another culture. She returned to Italy to begin her career in Graphic Design. In 1993 she was offered a commission to paint a mural and discovered a new outlet for her artistic vision. Continuing her post- graduate work at the “Accademia del Superfluo”, she studied the Art of Faux-Trompe L’Oeil to further develop her technique in mural decoration. Inspired by her grandfather, the renewed artist Sergio Agostini and a childhood of adventures, Veronica began her career in the art world in Rome, 1993. She moved to Los Angeles in 1995. Now resident of California she has fulfilled commissions for large murals in many Los Angeles homes and businesses, exhibiting her work in numerous prestigious galleries. Her canvases hang in private collections both here and abroad.
In 2008, after 13 years spent in the States, Veronica moved to Dominican Republic. Another childhood dream became reality. She teaches art classes and opens her own art Gallery in Sosua were she currently leaves. She continues to paint and exhibit her work in several local galleries…
At present time, in between Rome, Los Angeles and Dominican Republic, the artist is writing her illustrated autobiography, inspired by the latest series of paintings she is composing as a tribute to the renewed company “Victoria’s Secret”.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2019 “Group Show” Freddy Beras Goico Palace of Fine Arts, Dominican Republic
2016 “Solo Show” Magenta Gallery Sosua, Dominican Republic
2014 “Un Verano A Cielo Abierto” Group Show Novo Centro Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
2013 “Intermitencia del Sueño” Group Show Sala de Arte Camilo Carrau, Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic
“Made in Sosua” Group Show Casa de Arte de Sosua Sosua, Dominican Republic
2012 “Esencia” Solo Show Casa de Cultura Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic
2010 “1ra Expo Colectiva” Group Show Casa de Cultura Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic
2009 “Landscapes of the Mind” Group Show Miro’s Cabarete, Dominican Republic
2008 “Body of Art” Group Show J ferrari Gallery Glandale, Los Angeles
“The Bird Show” The Cactus Gallery Eagle Rock, Los Angeles
2007 “The Hive” Group Show The Hive Gallery Downtown, Los Angeles
“A Little Birdy Told Me ” Barnsdall Art Center Hollywood, Los Angeles
“Group Show and Renaissance Emporium” Art Share LA Downtown, Los Angeles
“Everything but the Kitschen Sync” Group Show La Luz De Jesus Gallery Hollywood, Los Angeles
2006 “Group Show” Cannibal Flower Infusion Gallery Downtown, Los Angeles
“Group Show” The Hive Gallery Downtown, Los Angeles
2005 “Sirens of Surrealism” Group Show Clair Obscure Gallery Hollywood, Los Angeles
“Food for Thought” Group Show M.A.D. Modern Art Downtown Downtown, Los Angeles
“Flower Power” Group Show The Dream Gallery Hollywood, Los Angeles
“Solo Show” Boccondivino Rome, Italy
2004 “Sirens of Surrealism” Group The Dream Gallery Hollywood, Los Angeles
“Summer Salon II” Group Show SLAC Silverlake, Los Angeles
“Solo Show” VIDA Los Feliz, Los Angeles
“Silhouette” Milla Angelina Gallery Hollywood, Los Angeles
“Solo Show” Andrew Gray Showroom Hollywood, Los Angeles
2002 “Group Show” Glass Garage Fine Art Gallery Beverly Hills, Los Angeles
2001 “Surreal Visions” Group Show Agora Gallery Soho, New York
“Holiday Show” Group Show Soho Gallery Studio City, Los Angeles
2000 “Christmas Show” Group Show Soho Gallery Studio City, Los Angeles
“The Flight” Solo Show Armendariz Production Downtown, Los Angeles
1999 “Art in the Garden” Solo Show Sycamore Street Faire Hollywood, Los Angeles
Other Professional Experiences
1992-1995 Graphic Design for Advertising and Logo, Italy
Business and Private Residences interior and exterior Murals
1995-2008 Business and Private Residences interior and exterior Murals, California
2010-2016 Teaching Arts and interior Murals, Dominican Republic
MURALS
Click to view the image below
Hours, days, months and years spent talking to the walls. In my mind the spaces have always been a magnificent infinity of emotions. I loved every single moment breathed by creating dimensions, there where before … there was only emptiness. Until’…
I had spent the whole year decorating the huge villa of one of my dearest US clients of my time in Los Angeles and I did not reach the end. The more I painted and the more the project expanded. Until one day after I turned to look: the gigantic golden ceilings in Renaissance bass-relief painted with a single brush on a ladder … the half-sixth arches adorned with sublime decorative frames colored bronze and cherry …The columns twirled from slender climbing branches up to touch the capitals … The elegant marble effects from the veins made with the trail of a long feather that covered display windows of Native American memorabilia and continued on the fireplace and on the living room tables…The roofs of Chinese temples and the various Oriental architectural elements that embellished the dining room with further furniture painted in sequence with ponds of delicate swans with golden lines and bamboo…The guest rooms in Thai style with bathrooms and doors decorated with trees and birds in flight and some laid on fragile branches of glossy and gold-plated paint, without neglecting the finely restored and painted sculptures on the patio of the garden…. I had said “enough”!
I had remembered every time my father told me not to waste time and concentrate only on my art and suddenly I had listened to him. It had taken years, but I had heard and understood the meaning of what he wanted to tell me. The decision taken suddenly without logic, dry, radical and inflexible, contained all the sweat and pains spent trying to survive, gathering time to compose my artwork. But time was never enough and now it was beginning to torment me seriously. I would have liked to be able to detach every single piece of wall I had painted in my life and make it a great performance, but it was not possible. Besides these works, they did not deign to pay me a great tribute, since they were mainly works carried out on other people’s commissions. But I… where was I in all this?
Apart from the mastery of these colossal works, whose details certainly did not belong to the category of murals but rather to real works on canvas, my essence remained hidden behind the foregone subjects and painted to please people. So, what was the point of so much damnation? It made no sense. I wondered if you could do all that just to carry on the shack and I realized that this compromise would have crushed me one day. It was too big a compromise in which the value of one’s existence was miserably lost. I had never really been able to understand how people lived with such weight for a lifetime. In these brief moments of conscious and concise existential awakening, you had to jump into the darkness and you had to do it yourself, at your own risk. That was how it worked… With a pinch of madness, dressed entirely in a deep faith in oneself, you had to leave everything. Abandoning the known, the comforts and the certainties. And even before the logic arrived with its fears hurl itself with a great leap in the dark… I had reached my thirty-five years, I thought of forty, but above all fifty, and the idea of finding myself at that age hovering on a ladder or a scaffolding was not attractive at all.
So one day I had resigned on the Catalina St. project and never returned to a mural.
From “Artist reveals Victoria’s Secret” The artist travel diary. Veronica Agostini 2018
