The exhibition
Enfant prodige of Fashion, in 1951 Capucci opened his first atelier when he was just twenty. Thanks to his studies, first at an artistic high school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts, he not only learned the history of art, but also the techniques of painting, models, drawing and graphics. The former gave him his cultural awareness and vision, the second the tools to study and verify new methods and approaches. It is none other than these studies and formal experimentation, that have continued unceasingly until today and been marked by awards and inventions, that have characterised his creative development.
In particular, the works on display here show the transition and decisive choice in the artistic field of his production in the last thirty years and his manifold sources of inspiration: the plant kingdom and the fundamental elements (Water, Earth, Air, and Fire) and physical phenomena to artistic references. Hence the pure colours of the Beato Angelico; wide sleeves and extravagant trains as in Pisanello, Benozzo Gozzoli, Paolo Uccello; the velvets and sartorial details of Carpaccio, Titian, Tintoretto; larger hips as in Velasquez; and then Tiepolo, to whom he publicly pays homage. Analysing it through his own sensitivity and culture, he also mastered all the novelties and suggestions of the 1900s.
However, above all, his entire production goes back to the eternal human dream of overcoming one’s own limits, through the creation of clothes of impossible dimensions, with asymmetrical offshoots, the wings of a bird or butterfly, silk gushes, long tails …. In these works the natural shapes of the body are surpassed into a sort of “divine”, abstract dimension that is devoid of material, physical or temporal needs.

From the famous Colonna [Column] dress – that marked a rift with sartorial traditional that, at the end of the 1970s, heralded the start of his dress-sculptures phase, to the Ventaglio [Fan], the symbol of creative freedom; his creations in the 1980s – with insets in the shape of panels, tubes, flowers, boxes, capitals …. – including Fuoco [Fire], with the volume of the plissé tending upwards, …. and the outstanding works of the 1990s, that made Capucci’s name in the art world, resulting in his participation at the Centenary Venice Biennale (1995) and exhibitions in the greatest museums in the world. The exhibition includes some of his most recent works, in the shape of Spire [Spires], Onda [Wave], Foglie [Leaves], Linee [Lines], Crete [Clay], and, created specifically for the occasion, the novel wedding dress-sculpture, in Mikado fire red silk, at the very beginning of the exhibition.