Lino Mannocci
1945–2021 · Italian painter, printmaker and writer linked to London and the La Metacosa group
Lino Mannocci (Viareggio, 1945 - 2021) was an Italian painter, printmaker and writer. Born in Viareggio, he moved to London in 1968, where he studied at Camberwell College of Arts between 1971 and 1976 and then at the Slade School of Fine Art. From 1976 he returned every year to a small village in the hills between Lucca and Viareggio, a place that shows up in much of his work.
In the early 1980s he co-founded the La Metacosa movement and was deeply involved in its exhibitions and activities. His first museum show came in 1984 at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen. During the 1990s he exhibited in San Francisco, New York, London, Milan, Florence and Bergamo, and in 2005 he had a solo show, Let there be smoke, at the H. Christian Andersen Museum in Rome. His monotypes are held in collections including the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Mead Art Museum in Amherst.
He also wrote on art. In 1988 he compiled the catalogue raisonné of Claude Lorrain's prints for Yale University Press, and in 2019 he published a study of the 1913 marriage of Gino Severini and Jeanne Fort. His legacy rests on the continuation of La Metacosa and on the idea of friendship among artists as a form of collective work.