Italy 21st century
Carla Accardi was an Italian abstractionist painter associated with the Arte Informel and Arte Povera movements and a founding member of the art groups Forma (1947) and Continuità (1961). She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo and Florence.
Carla Accardi was known for her innovative use of materials and her exploration of geometric shapes and vivid colours. One of her notable contributions was the introduction of the "tela intrecciata" (interwoven canvas) technique, in which she used strips of coloured canvas to create textured and layered compositions.
Accardi's work often exhibited a sense of rhythm and movement, a dynamic arrangement of forms and lines. Her compositions are characterised by a sense of balance and harmony and often incorporate elements of repetition and symmetry.
Angelo Accardi is a contemporary Italian artist. He grew up surrounded by both modern and traditional art. Although he studied fine art at the Art Academy of Naples, he never completed his training. Angelo Accardi illustrates surreal visions of everyday life under realistic backdrops of urban and natural landscapes. There is never a single meaning, but a whole story behind each painting. Ironic, striking, and playful, Accardi’s unique perspective and avant-garde style is a result of his diverse inspirations.
Vito Acconci was an American artist, designer, and architect. He is best known for his pioneering work in the field of performance art and for his provocative installations that explore the relationship between the human body and space.
Acconci received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Holy Cross College in 1962. He later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Acconci became known for his groundbreaking performance works, which often involved the artist subjecting his own body to various forms of physical and psychological stress.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Acconci shifted his focus to installation art, creating immersive environments that challenged viewers' perceptions of space and their own bodies. He also worked as a designer and architect, creating public sculptures and buildings around the world.
Acconci's work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Venice Biennale. He received numerous awards and honors for his contributions to contemporary art, including the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 1995.
His legacy as an influential and provocative artist continues to be felt in the contemporary art world today.
Giuseppe Ajmone was an Italian painter and printmaker.
He studied painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and in 1946 was one of the signatories of the Realist Manifesto, also known as "Oltre Guernica.
Ajmone painted both landscapes and still lifes as well as semi-abstract figures.
Ugo Attardi was an Italian painter, sculptor and writer. Attardi moved from Genoa to Rome in the early 1950s, where he formed the group Forma 1 together with other artists. His sculpture of Ulysses is now permanently installed in Battery Park in New York
Gaetana (Gae) Aulenti was an Italian architect and designer who was active in furniture design, graphic design, stage design, lighting design, exhibition and interior design. She was known for her contributions to the design of important museums such as the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (in collaboration with ACT Architecture), the Contemporary Art Gallery at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the restoration of Palazzo Grassi in Venice, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (in collaboration with HOK Architects). Aulenti was one of only a few women architects and designers who gained notoriety in their own right during the post-war period in Italy, where Italian designers sought to make meaningful connections to production principles, and influenced culture far beyond Italy. This avant-garde design movement blossomed into an entirely new type of architecture and design, one full of imaginary utopias leaving standardization to the past.
Kenjiro Adzuma (Japanese: 吾妻 兼治郎) is a Japanese abstraction sculptor known for his avant-garde and innovative approach to sculpture and installation art, one of Japan's most important post-World War II artists. He also lived and worked in Italy for many years. He studied sculpture at the Graduate School of Art at the University of Tokyo and at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he attended Marino Marini's class.
Kenjiro Adzuma was a key figure in the Japanese art movement known as Mono-ha (School of Things) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mono-ha artists explored the relationship between natural and industrial materials, often juxtaposing them to create thought-provoking installations.
Carlo Bartoli is an Italian architect and designer. Author of numerous projects, such as the Gaia chair, included in the permanent design collection of the MoMA in New York and the Milan Triennale Design Museum, and the 4875 chair for Kartell, the world's first made of polypropylene, as well as part of the design collection of the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Franco Batacchi was an Italian painter and sculptor.
Franco Batacchi presented himself as a Renaissance artist, curious about modern experiments, including materials such as ink and gold leaf on paper made by himself. From paper he could move with equal talent to sculptures in steel, other metals and glass.
Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian-born American contemporary performance artist; she also works with photography, video art, sculpture, and painting. Many of her works have made use of professional models, sometimes in large numbers and sometimes naked or nearly so, to stage tableaux vivants. She works in the United States, and is based in Los Angeles as of 2009. Her early work was focused on gender and appeared to be autobiographical; her later work is focused on race. Starting in 2008 she began working with Kanye West on collaborations and commercial projects.
Mario Bellini is an Italian architect and designer. After graduating from the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1959, Bellini pursued a career as an architect, exhibition designer, product designer, and furniture designer, during the Italian economic boom of the late 20th century. Bellini has received several accolades in a variety of design fields, including eight Compasso d'Oro awards, and the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Triennale di Milano. In 2019, the Italian President of the Chamber of Deputies, Roberto Fico, awarded Bellini a career medal, in recognition of his contributions to Italian architecture and design.
Mirella Bentivoglio is an Italian painter, sculptor and poet, representative of visual concrete poetry.
She was trained as an art historian and artist in Italy, Switzerland and England, and in the 1960s she joined the concrete poetry movement and began to use elements of the alphabet to create expressive images. A few years later, Bentivoglio became increasingly interested in sculpture, turning letters into three-dimensional forms. In many of her later works, two images, a book and an egg, began to recur.
Mauro Bergonzoli is an Italian artist living and working near Munich.
Mauro showed a talent for drawing early on and found work quite quickly in advertising agencies in Milan. This was followed by a 25-year career as a creative director in commercial and animated films. It was only after that that Bergonzoli turned to pure art.
Bergonzoli is best known for his contemporary "canaletto-sketch" interpretations of Venice. In his signature neo-pop style, he shows the ancient trading city in all its splendor and splendor. The artist uses mostly acrylic paints, and his favorite chips - the all-seeing eye and the magic rabbit - give a twist to his creations.
Gastone Biggi was an Italian painter, sculptor, writer, poet, and musicologist.
Biggi combined painting with his activities as an art writer and musicologist. In 1962 his key work The Birth of the Point was published, theorizing the study of the sign module, which he would develop throughout his life. That same year he formed Group 1.
Renata Boero is an Italian artist and restorer.
After completing her liberal arts education in Switzerland, she worked at the Palazzo Rosso Museum in Genoa. It was during the restoration of old tapestry canvases that Boero began to experiment with the use of natural substances in painting. She uses plant elements in her artworks and installations.
Peppi Bottrop is a German graphic artist who lives and works in Sicily.
He graduated from the Dusseldorf Academy of Arts and has participated in many exhibitions.
Bottrop is a color-blind painter who uses graphite on canvas which he paints directly on the wall. His monochrome paintings depict rectangles, circles and triangles - they are expressive, their skeleton-like abstract outlines reminiscent of a kind of music.
Bruno Bruni senior is an Italian lithographer, graphic artist, painter and sculptor. He became commercially successful in the 1970s. In 1977, he won the International Senefeld award for Lithography. He has since become one of the most successful Italian artists in Germany and one of Germany's best known lithographers.
Silvano Bussotti is an Italian composer, painter and opera director, set and costume designer.
Silvano learned to play the violin at an early age, studied harmony and counterpoint at the Cherubini Conservatory in Florence, and studied with various teachers. In addition to music, he was fond of drawing and painting. His first works, influenced by Luigi Dallapiccola and Roberto Lupi, were written in the avant-garde dodecaphonic technique, and he also made extensive use of the aleatoric method. Bussotti was a participant in "anti-music" concerts, for which he created works without any sounds at all.
Bussotti's compositions include numerous pieces for various vocal, instrumental and mixed ensembles. In 1963 he co-founded the Group of 70 (Florence). Between 1968 and 2001 he worked as a director, costume designer and stage designer at the leading opera houses in Italy, La Scala, La Fenice; Massimo (Palermo), Reggio (Turin) and others. In total, he created about 40 opera productions.
Bussotti's art exhibitions are held in various countries around the world. Bussotti is also known for his extravagant graphic scores, in which he found self-expression as an artist, but this hides the meaningful nature of his musical achievements.
Stefano Calisti is an Italian artist. His paintings, characterised by an unusually lively colour palette, have been widely acclaimed by audiences and critics alike. His favourite subjects include landscape, evoking associations with colour, matter and light.
Calisti's work is characterised by his attention to colour and texture, often creating a sense of movement and dynamism in his works. Behind an intense bordering on surrealist colour, a conceptual element emerges in which naturalness and artificiality are juxtaposed.
Throughout his career, Calisti has exhibited widely in Italy and abroad, including solo shows. He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and the Museum of Modern Art in Rome.
Piero Pizzi Cannella is an Italian artist and painter living and working in Rome.
Cannella is known for his conceptual works, he became part of the New Roman School. The artist's continuous research has led him to create cycles of works on various subjects: for example, Turkish dresses, jewelry, flowers, furnishings, all in isolation from the human being.
Arturo Carmassi was an Italian abstractionist painter, sculptor, and printmaker.
He studied at the Albertina Academy in Turin. Carmassi created many images, sculptures and engravings on metal and worked in lithography and silkscreen. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and biennales and is an internationally recognized sculptor.
Nicola Carrino is an Italian sculptor.
Since 1969 he has been creating large three-dimensional geometric-modular works that fit organically into the surrounding landscape.
Carrino was professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and a member of the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca.
Enrico Castellani was an Italian artist. He was active in Italy from the early 1960s, and associated with Piero Manzoni and Vincenzo Agnetti. Castellani is known for his "paintings of light". He studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure in Belgium, then settled in Milan. Castellani collaborated with artists such as Getulio Alviani, Piero Manzoni, and others. In 2010 he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting.
Achille Castiglioni was an Italian architect and designer of furniture, lighting, radiograms and other objects. As a professor of design, he advised his students "If you are not curious, forget it. If you are not interested in others, what they do and how they act, then being a designer is not the right job for you."
Roberto Ceccherini is a contemporary Italian artist and sculptor.
In the early eighties he began his artistic quest outside the constraints of serial production, creating compositions and sculptures that stand out for their plastic-chromatic balance and expressive power.
Mario Ceroli is an Italian sculptor. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, Mississippi. One of his sculptures is on the Luigi Einaudi campus of the University of Turin, and another one is at the Vatican Museums.
Sandro Chia is an Italian painter and sculptor. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was, with Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria, and Mimmo Paladino, a principal member of the Italian Neo-Expressionist movement which was baptised Transavanguardia by Achille Bonito Oliva.
Hsiao Chin is a Chinese modernist painter who has worked in Europe.
Born into an intellectual family in Shanghai, Hsiao moved to Taiwan in 1949 and was educated in the art department of the Taipei Teachers' Training School in Taiwan Province of Taipei (now National Taipei Teachers' University). In 1955, he and seven other artists founded the Ton Fan Art Group, the first postwar contemporary art group in Taiwan that attempted to break free from realism and sought a modern expression of Eastern spirituality.
As an innovative artist and co-founder of significant modernist movements in Taiwan and Europe, Hsiao's work explored Asian philosophy while embracing forms of Western postwar avant-garde practices.
In the mid-1950s, Hsiao settled in Milan, where he lived for half a century. In 1961, along with Italian painter Antonio Calderara and Japanese sculptor Adzuma Kenjiro in Milan, he co-founded the Punto movement, which brought together numerous Eastern and Western abstractionist artists. Xiao Qin's work has been exhibited around the world, including New York's MoMA and Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Art Museum of China, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, and the National Taiwan Museum of Art.
Francesco Clemente is an Italian contemporary artist. He has lived at various times in Italy, India and New York City. Some of his work is influenced by the traditional art and culture of India. He has worked in various artistic media including drawing, fresco, graphics, mosaic, oils and sculpture. He was among the principal figures in the Italian Transavanguardia movement of the 1980s, which was characterised by a rejection of Formalism and conceptual art and a return to figurative art and Symbolism.
Ferdinando Codognotto is an Italian artist, designer and sculptor.
He is one of the most important representatives of the world's cultural scene.
His wooden works can be found in public and private collections in Europe, America and Japan.
Pietro Consagra was an Italian sculptor and one of the leading figures in the post-war Italian art movement known as Arte Informale or Forma 1.
Pietro Consagra's early work was influenced by traditional figurative sculpture, but he soon became fascinated by the abstract art movement. He rejected the idea of creating sculptures that imitated reality and instead focused on exploring the relationship between form, space and the viewer's perception.
Consagra's sculptures often feature simplified geometric forms, emphasising clean lines and solid volumes. His works are characterised by a sense of balance, harmony and spatial tension.
Antonio Corpora was a Tunisian born Italian painter who followed the Tachisme style of Abstract art.
In the 1930s, Corpora's style was abstract and geometric, heavily influenced by Cubism and Fauvism. His work later shifted more towards abstract expressionism.
Enzo Cucchi is an Italian painter. He was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with his countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Sandro Chia. The movement was at its peak during the 1980s and was part of the worldwide movement of Neo-Expressionist painters.
Francesco D'Arena is an Italian painter and sculptor.
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lecce and lives and works in Cassano delle Murge (Bari).
In his works, D'Arena compares the history of Italy with a biographical perspective, intertwining personal and collective memory.
Betty Danon is a Turkish-born artist who has worked in Italy.
She created her works in a variety of techniques: painting and collage, graphics and performance, mail-art and sculpture, hundreds of works on paper and canvases. Betty Danon sought to convey the harmony of sound and sign with all the means available to her.
Maurizio Duranti is a contemporary Italian artist, architect and designer. He is engaged in industrial design, designing for numerous companies in all sectors of the home. Duranti is a ten-time winner of the Chicago Good Design Award and was honoured at the Compasso d'Oro in Milan.
Erro, real name Guðmundur Guðmundsson, is a contemporary Icelandic painter.
Erro studied painting at the Reykjavik and Oslo Art Academies between 1952 and 1954. He then moved to Italy, where he studied mosaic art in Florence and Ravenna until 1958.
Erro participated in the Venice Biennale in 1986. In 1989 he donated a large part of his works to the Reykjavik Art Museum.
The style of the paintings created by Erro lies on the border between surrealism and pop art. The main theme of his paintings is the depiction of modern civilisation, its technical perfection and its inhumanity. He also uses comic book techniques and science fiction themes in his work.
Giuseppe Fortunato is a versatile Italian artist, sculptor, designer, and draftsman. At the end of the 1980s he created, together with other artists, the Images movement. Fortunato's famous paintings were created in the technique of collage with enamel on canvas, and elements of surrealism and metaphysical painting can be traced in his work.
Gianfranco Frattini was an Italian architect and designer. He is a member of the generation that created the Italian design movement in the late 1950s through the 1960s and is considered to have played a major role in shaping it.
