Francesco Conz

Francesco Conz was a Venetian art collector and publisher. He collaborated with some of the most important people and movements of the neo-avant-garde: in 1972 he opened the Galleria d’Arte Moltiplicata in Venice, at the same time he established the edizioni F. Conz publishing house and started to organise his archive. In the same years, through trips to Germany and the United States, he met several artists from Viennese Actionism and Fluxus avant-gardes and started to host them in Italy, while promoting their editions and collecting their historical works. In 1973 he sold his entire collection and moved to Asolo, organising  performances, residencies and artists editions at Palazzo Baglioni, with guest such as Joe Jones, Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch - which realised here in 1973 his famous work Asolo Raum -, Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik, Geoffrey Hendricks, Dick Higgins; Finally he moved to Verona in 1979, initially collaborating to Edizioni Factotum and then creating a new home-workshop venue in Via Quadrelli, where stayed - among others - Joseph Beuys, Hermann Nitsch, Henri Chopin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ben Patterson (Peterlini 2012). Since the early 70s, the different venues where Conz established his activities were therefore fundamental meeting places for the artists of the new international avant-garde movements, while Conz’s work, as recalled by his collaborator Patrizio Peterlini, went far beyond the usual activities of a collector and publisher to create a personal relationship - often a quite eccentric one - with several of these artists, encouraging meetings and dissolving the boundaries between the artistic practice and the personal experience.