Salvo (Leonforte, Enna, 1947 – Turin, 2015) Salvo (real name Salvatore Mangione) was born in Leonforte, in the province of Enna in 1947. In 1956 he and his family move from Catania to Turin, which will always remain his adoptive city. In the early 1960s he begins painting and supports himself by selling low-priced portraits, landscapes and copies of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. In 1963 he participates in the 121st Esposizione della Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti with a drawing after Leonardo.
Italian painter Francesco Clemente came to prominence in the mid-1970s with vivid paintings rife with erotic imagery of mutilated body parts, gesturing amorphous figures often depicted in rich colors, as well as a series of contorted self-portraits. Fascinated with Indian art and mysticism, his gouache paintings and pastel drawings are especially noted for their intense and arcane quasi-religious content that has grown increasingly surreal in his later works. Though large in scale, Clemente’s work often conveys an uncanny and unabashed intimacy. Clemente has been compared to such painters as Georg Baselitz and David Salle.
Sherrie Levine (born 1947) is an American photographer, painter, and conceptual artist. Some of her work consists of exact photographic reproductions of the work of other photographers such as Walker Evans, Eliot Porter and Edward Weston.
Mauro Di Silvestre lives and works in Rome. Mauro Di Silvestre was born in Rome in 1968, he studied painting in Los Angeles and Rome. He gets several public awards such as the City of Lissone Prize in 2001 and the Celeste Prize in 2004, winning the 2nd and the dedicated prize respectively to the category of Emerging Painters.
Giorgio de Chirico,10 July 1888 – 20 November 1978, was an Italian artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. His most well-known works often feature Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and illogical perspective. His imagery reflects his affinity for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the mythology of his birthplace.
Massimo Campigli, born Max Ihlenfeldt, 4 July 1895 – 31 May 1971, was an Italian painter and journalist. He started to paint upon his arrival in Paris, where at the Café du Dôme he consorted with artists including Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Gino Severini and Filippo De Pisis. Extended visits to the Louvre deepened Campigli's interest in ancient Egyptian art, which became a lasting source of his own painting.His early figurative works applied geometrical designs to the human figure, reflecting the influence of Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger as well as the Purism of "L’Esprit Nouveau".
Don Eddy (born 1944) is a contemporary representational painter.He gained recognition in American art around 1970 amid a group of artists that critics and dealers identified as Photorealists or Hyperrealists, based on their work's high degree of verisimilitude and use of photography as a resource material.
Franco Angeli, one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century, was born in Rome in 1935 from a family with a solid socialist tradition. He did not attend regular art studies but began to paint in 1957. Through the sculptor Edgardo Mannucci he got to know the work of Alberto Burri who influenced, with his informal poetics, his first works: monochrome and material canvases in dark tones covered with torn and torn nylon, a symbol of poverty and pain.
He is considered to be one of the most significant and pre-eminent artists of Italian postmodernism. His work was exhibited in the famous 1962 "New Realists" show at the Sidney Janis Gallery with other young Pop art and Nouveau réalisme innovators, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
Italian artist and painter Piero Pizzi Cannella is best known for his conceptual works. He experimented with Citazionismo anacronista, an artistic movement known for its quoting of art history. After this period of his career he removed himself from the arts scene, before becoming part of the Nuova Scuola Romana (or “New Roman School”). His figurative works gained attention of dealer Fabio Sargenti and he restarted his career, focusing on the abstraction of the human figure in objects such as tables, chairs, clothes, and personal ornaments—all separated and detached from a real context.
Mimmo Rotella, who represented Italy in the 1964 Venice Biennale, was experimental to his core: in his poetry, paintings, photographs, sculptural assemblages, and collages, he broke down conventions, leaving behind a body of extravagant work. Through his collages, he became associated with Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé, and François Dufrêne—together known as Les Affichistes. Rotella was also linked to the French Nouveau Réalistes, for reflecting commodity culture, and its excesses and absurdities, in his art.
He was born in Naples in 1935. After having traveled to Turkey, Egypt and Greece, he settled in Nice in 1949, where he opened a second-hand record shop. In the meantime he begins his artistic research as a self-taught: he is passionate about everything that represents novelty in art, the shock compared to what already exists, recognizing this attitude in the work of Marcel Duchamp, an artist whom Ben considers a difficult master to overcome. Taking into account his lesson, he defines, towards the end of the fifties, the criteria that make a work of art valid: the novelty and the exaltation-affirmation of the ego, which push him to make "appropriations" by signing everything on which an artistic paternity has not yet been recognized.
Turi Simeti’s career has spanned the history of Italian art in the second half of the 20th century. From 1961 onward, his art was based on abstraction, monochromes, and the oval. Simeti has maintained this minimalist commitment to a form that can be perceived beneath the surface of the canvas as a fundamental sign while pursuing his artistic radicalism. He never strayed from the aesthetic direction he had chosen. Turi Simeti’s work invites us to a spatial and meditative experience of painting, a chapter in the monochromatic adventure that took place in the second half of the twentieth century in Italy and around the world.
Aldo Mondino was born in Turin in 1938, where he died in 2005. In 1959 he moved to Paris, where he attended William Heyter's studio, the Ecole du Louvre and attended the mosaic course at the Academy of Fine Arts with Severini and Licata. In 1960, when he returned to Italy, he began his exhibition activity at the Galleria L'Immagine in Turin (1961) and at the Galleria Alfa in Venice (1962). The meeting with Gian Enzo Sperone, director of the Il Punto Gallery, is fundamental for his artistic career, with a partnership that still exists. Important personal exhibitions are also presented at the Stein Gallery in Turin, the Marconi Studio in Milan, the La Salita Gallery in Rome, the Galleria Paludetto in Turin.
Carla Accardi rose to fame as founding member of the 1947 Italian avant-garde movement Forma 1, a group of artists based in Rome who, in the face of Fascism, embraced the principals of Futurism and Marxism. As one of the key figures of abstract art in Italy during the time, Accardi developed an iconic visual lexicon of calligraphic marks that, when combined with her minimalist color palette and dynamic compositions, showcased the endless possibilities of abstraction.
Piero Gilardi (born 1942, Turin) is a visual artist. Born in Italy from a Swiss family, he studied at the Liceo Artistico in Turin. In an interview with LeGrace G. Benson, Gilardi stated that his personal encounter with artist Michelangelo Pistoletto and others helped him in the development of his own artwork.
Alviani was born in Udine, where he showed talent for design and geometric drawing from his childhood. He enrolled in the Venice Art School, but soon showed little interest in his studies, spending afternoons in Venice's museums in contemplation of classical masterpieces. He also started doing small jobs for local architects, and helped local artists in inking projects such as etchings.
Tano Festa (Rome, November 2, 1938 - Rome, January 9, 1988) was an Italian artist, painter and photographer. He attended the Art Institute of Rome and graduated in photography in 1957, he trained on the example of Cy Twombly and gestural and informal painting. His first public participation took place in 1959 together with Franco Angeli and Giuseppe Uncini, in a group exhibition at the La Salita gallery in Rome, where, only in 1961, he held his first personal exhibition. Protagonist of the Roman pop school, he welcomed the new dada solutions with formal rigor, proposing isolated monochrome objects for everyday use. Famous are the shutters, mirrors and windows, which become the support of his activity as a painter.