Empatia
Empatia
Beppe Giacobbe
Against a field of vivid green: two figures, standing apart. A woman in a long dress faces half-away; a man, hands in pockets, faces forward. Neither looks at the other.
Inside each of them - filling dress and suit alike - a botanical world: dense, fine-line drawings of stems and leaves and flowers, the intricate vocabulary of a herbarium rendered in black on cream.
Empatia - empathy. Giacobbe's image is structural: they're made of the same world. What keeps them apart is only where they're looking.
First shown at Distrazioni (Bonvini 1909, 2024). Fine art print on 308gsm Hahnemühle cotton. Image 25 × 30 cm on 35 × 50 cm sheet. Edition of fifty, each with a numbered certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
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Information
Artist Beppe Giacobbe
Title Empatia
Year 2021
Technique 3-color letterpress printing from laser-cut MDF matrices
Format Image 25 × 30 cm on 35 × 50 cm sheet
Paper 308gsm Hahnemühle cotton
Print run Limited edition of 50
Framed in white box frame
About the artist
Beppe Giacobbe was born in Milan in 1953 and started drawing almost immediately - with the paints from his father's palette. By the time he was ten he was copying Morandi and Cézanne, and studying piano at the same time. By his teenage years he was playing in a rock band, performing late into the night far from Milan. Too many absences cost him a year at school and landed him in his father's fabric shop - which, in retrospect, may have taught him something about surface and colour.
He went on to study at the Accademia di Brera, then spent three summers at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has created images and covers for publishers across Europe and America, illustrated books for children, and contributed to the Corriere della Sera for decades. He taught illustration for twenty-four years - first at IED Milan, then at ISIA Urbino.
In 2013, Lazy Dog Press published *Visionary Dictionary: Beppe Giacobbe from A to Z*, cataloguing the world in images. In 2024, Edizioni Bonvini 1909 published *Distrazioni* — personal research and editorial work across a career spent looking very carefully at things.
About the workshop
A few steps off Corso Lodi in Milan, a stationery and print shop has been open since 1909. Costante and Luigia Bonvini founded it as the neighbourhood's place for paper and ink. More than a century later, the original presses still run.
In 2014, a group of friends rescued the shop from disappearing, restoring it with architects who specialise in cultural heritage. The machines - a 19th-century platen press, an Imperial Cylinder Press, a Heidelberg Stella - were returned to working order.
Bonvini 1909 is now part print shop, part gallery, part cultural institution. Every piece carries the particular character that only a hand-fed press can produce - the slight variation, the impression in the paper, the evidence of a human hand.
