Octavia Monaco

Octavia Monaco is one of the most important Italian illustrators. Octavia Monaco was born in France in 1963 of a Galician mother and an Italian father. She lives and works in Italy since 1970.

She started working as a goldsmith and learnt the patient art of processing and the manufacture of materials. Fond of art in general and of painting in particular, and especially fascinated by fairy-tales, she became a self-taught painter. In 1991 she attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna but she left the courses after a year to carry out her own researches exploring different expressions of contemporary art and developing an artistic language suitable for a refined and mature public.

Myths and fairy-tales give her the opportunity to draw on intimate poetics fuelled by dreams and archetypal wisdom.
She has taken part in many solo and group exhibitions, some of her original works were displayed in the Louvre bookshop in 2004. In the same year she won the Andersen prize as  “best illustrator” for “the unexhausted and stubborn figurative research in her artistic development; for the pure and precious beauty of her images: for the admirable and lasting dialectical relationship with the texts”.
She was selected for the Premio Bocca of Milan, 2006.
Since 2005 she is professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Bologna in the “Illustration” section.

Product Dimensions:
148x210mm
Extent: 96 pages
Binding: Hardcover
Publication: March 2011

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