Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, Sculpture, Printmaking, Books & Prints
Website: colpapress.com
Luca Nino Antonucci is a San Francisco-based artist, publisher, and curator. He received his BA from the University of San Francisco and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010. He has lived and worked in San Francisco throughout his career, becoming a central figure in the city’s independent publishing and artist community.
In 2010, Antonucci co-founded Colpa Press, a publishing practice and print studio that produces limited-edition artist books, prints, and objects. What began as a handmade printing operation grew into one of the Bay Area’s most recognized independent art publishers, with Colpa’s publications entering the permanent collections of SFMOMA, The Getty Foundation, LACMA, MoMA New York, the Whitney Museum, Stanford University, and the Kadist Foundation. In 2016, Antonucci co-founded the San Francisco Art Book Fair, which has grown to host over 120 exhibitors and approximately 15,000 annual visitors. He is also a resident artist at Basement, a VHS archive and free weekly film screening space in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Beyond his own artistic practice, Antonucci has been an active organizer and collaborator in the Bay Area art scene — co-founding Service Industries, a gallery for artists working in the service industry, and operating a series of storefront ventures including the Edicola newsstand at 6th and Market (2012–2013) and Colpa Books & Video in San Francisco’s Chinatown (2018–2019).
Antonucci works across photography, sculpture, and printing processes, with a sustained interest in how objects accumulate and shed meaning over time. His practice draws on analog media technologies — VHS cassettes, color video printers, UV flatbed printers, risograph printing — to investigate themes of spectatorship, simulation, and representation. Recurring influences include cyberpunk literature of the 1970s–1990s, particularly its preoccupation with artificial worlds and mediated experience.
A significant thread in his work involves images of images: photographs taken of film stills, printed at a remove from their source, placing the viewer in a loop between image and image-maker. The 2024 artist book Vertical Hold uses a color video printer to capture stills from analog films depicting characters looking at, projecting, or making images — a closed circuit of seeing and being seen. His installations similarly use architectural elements and found objects to stage encounters with familiar things made strange, as in Simulacron-3 (2017), where a cubicle wall printed with imagery from the film World on a Wire reframed a scene about discovering the artificial nature of one’s reality.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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