The Mara Coccia Association

An experience of great significance in Mara Coccia's career is represented by the Mara Coccia Association, an exhibition space of which a wide selection of materials is displayed in the exhibition at the National Gallery dedicated to the gallery owner. A large part of the Coccia archive acquired by the Gallery documents the thirty years of activity of the Association.

After interrupting her collaboration with Daniela Ferraria in 1977, as she did not share the excessive curatorial approach of the younger woman at the Arco d'Alibert, the gallery owner moved to Spoleto for a few years before returning to Rome in 1982 when, with the foundation of the Mara Coccia Association, she began to develop her exhibition ideas independently.

The new gallery was initially located in via dei Condotti 21 (with a schedule made up of historical artists such as Balla, Capogrossi, Morandi and Severini), while in 1985 it moved to via del Corso 530 where it remained until 1993, sharing the space with La Nuova Pesa. The fact that the Roman settings has profoundly changed compared to 1977 does not undermine the activity of the gallery owner who, thanks to her experience and many long-standing personal contacts, managed the Association successfully from the start. She forms relationships of trust and confidence with, for example, established artists such as Achille Perilli, Piero Dorazio and Fabio Mauri, presented by Coccia in 1985 with the solo exhibition Entartete Kunst. The strength of Mara Coccia in recent years also lies in the relationships with Italian and foreign institutions thanks to which she also works outside the Association: this is the case of the Forma 1 (Shape 1) exhibition, set up in 1987 in France and Germany with the support of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In recent years, the Mara Coccia Association has shifted its interest in different artistic generations: when it comes to exhibiting paintings, the gallery owner chooses authors who are already well established, whereas she focuses on ideas from emerging young people when presenting video art or sculpture. In fact, it is in the latter field that at the end of the Eighties the collaboration with some emerging artists begins, for which she becomes a point of reference: these are Mauro Folci, Licia Galizia and Roberto Pietrosanti, of whom she exhibited various monographs between 1988 and 1994.

After all, sculpture is supported by Coccia without a solution of continuity also through already established artists such as Giuseppe Uncini, Nicola Carrino and Mauro Staccioli, as well as in the nineties through the collaboration with Architettura Arte Moderna, in whose spaces she exhibited between 1994 and 2000 since in 1993 she abandoned the via del Corso gallery. From 2000 to 2008 the Association found its own headquarters in via del Vantaggio 4, in the home of Coccia herself, while from 2008 to closure in 2012 it moved to via del Vantaggio 46/a with the support of Anna Marra and Andrea Alibrandi.

In the last decade of the Association's activity, the gallery owner was particularly interested in environmental appreciation, as demonstrated by her support for interventions in the Volterra area and the mediation in the acquisition by the National Gallery of Rome 2011, a monumental work on an urban scale by Staccioli. Even after the Association closed in 2012, Mara Coccia's contribution to the world of art remained significant: since then, with a view to the donation to the National Gallery, she dedicated herself to reorganising her archive without which it would not have been possible to deepen and reveal her work since 1982 through an unpublished exhibition.