Lugano
Franca Coen, married name Sonnino, was born on February 13, 1932, in Rome, into a family of Jewish origin. After earning a degree in Literature, she devoted herself lovingly to her family and began knitting sweaters and scarves for her children, blankets, and home decorations.
It was the early 1970s; Franca’s children were still young, and living in the apartment just below theirs, in the Balduina neighborhood, was a small and industrious Sardinian woman—an artist: Maria Lai. A mutual fascination quickly developed between the two women, and the world Maria Lai brought with her captivated the young housewife. From time to time, she would bring her fabrics for her work (Franca’s husband worked in the textile industry), and sometimes she would even bring her dinner, as Maria, immersed in her work, often forgot to prepare it.
Franca would watch Maria work and create, while Maria encouraged her with one of her most emblematic phrases: “Use your hands to create useless things—stop making useful objects.” So Franca Sonnino began experimenting with painting, creating canvases where memories and references to spinning and weaving could be glimpsed through the thin, painted lines. We can infer that Maria Lai quietly and subtly guided her friend on a search for her own creativity—holding her hand, but never pointing the way.
Thus, continuing to experiment with these “useless things,” Franca Sonnino found in thread—an ancient symbol of femininity, the domestic sphere, and the “millennial absence of women”—her main medium and turning point. She began with two-tone weavings, using knitting needles “as thick as sticks” (as recalled by Mirella Bentivoglio in a 2002 essay), eventually incorporating her signature use of iron wire wrapped in wool or cotton.
After a first group exhibition in Rome in 1972, the following year she held a significant solo show at the Galleria La Triade in Turin, with art critic Luigi Carlucci presenting her work.
In 1983, a major exhibition was held in her honor at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. Her thread-drawn books and libraries were displayed on white walls, their shadows and empty spaces playing across the surfaces—grand in scale yet delicate in presence—hallmarks of her refined artistic practice.
In the spring of 1988, following a significant number of both solo and group exhibitions, the Cooperativa Esperienze Culturali in Bari organized a large exhibition dedicated to Franca Sonnino. The exhibition text was once again written by Marcello Venturoli, and this time the featured works were her Wall Landscapes: views of plowed fields and hills, rendered in a lightly three-dimensional form, evoking dreamlike abstraction.
Throughout 1990, Franca Sonnino took part in numerous group exhibitions. One particularly notable event was Le Muse Inquietanti. Aspetti attuali della ricerca artistica femminile (“The Unsettling Muses: Current Aspects of Women’s Artistic Research”), held in May at the Civic Museum of Rende, with written contributions by Elena Pontiggia and Federica di Castro.
Three years later, in 1993, her works traveled to New York, where they were shown at the Jonkers Education Art Center in the Photoidea exhibition, curated by Mirella Bentivoglio. The following year, in 1994, she held a solo show at Galleria Il Gabbiano in La Spezia, titled Oltre il Segno (“Beyond the Sign”), marking the beginning of a long collaboration with the Ligurian gallery, which would go on to host her work on numerous occasions.
Among her more recent exhibitions are: La forma del vuoto at the Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome (2005), The other/L’altro, Italian Pavilion at the 11th Cairo Biennale (2008) and La Città at La Cuba D’Oro, Rome.
Since 2019, Franca Sonnino has been exclusively represented by the Repetto Gallery, which, in the same year, organized the exhibition Threading Spaces—featuring Nedda Guidi, Elisabetta Gut, Maria Lai, and Franca Sonnino.
