Biography
Born in Castelmassa, Rovigo, in 1930, in 1952 he moved to Brussels, where he attended painting and sculpture courses at the Académie des Beaux Arts and, in 1956, he graduated in architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Cambre. He returns to Milan and starts working at the architect Buzzi’s studio, with whom he will collaborate until 1963. In 1959 he creates his first relief surface. With Piero Manzoni he took part in the experiences of the Zero group and founded the magazine “Azimuth” and the gallery of the same name where, in 1960, he held his first personal exhibition. In that same year he was present with three surfaces in relief at the “Monochrome Malerei” exhibition at the Städtisches Museum in Leverkusen and, with Manzoni, exhibited the Tartaruga in Rome at the Galleria; in 1962, always with Manzoni, he exhibited at the Galerie Aujourd’hui in Brussels and participated in the “Nul” exhibition, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1963, in Milan, he exhibited with a solo exhibition in the Aries Gallery, in 1964 he presented three canvases at the XXXII Venice Biennale and participated in the Guggenheim International Award in New York. In 1965 his large white surface is present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the international survey “The Responsive Eye” and his works are proposed to represent Italy at the VIII Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo and at “Trigon 65 ”, Burggarten / Palmenhaus, in Graz. In 1966 he has a personal room at the XXXIII Venice Biennale for which he receives the Gollin Prize, stays for a period in the United States and creates the works that he will exhibit in his first solo show in New York at the Betty Parsons Gallery. In 1967 he was invited to build an environmental work for the exhibition “The space of the image” in Palazzo Trinci in Foligno, partially destroyed after the exhibition; he will create a second version in 1970 as part of “Vitality of the negative in Italian art 1960/70” at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. After a moment of “exile” in Switzerland, in 1973 he returned to Italy and moved to Celleno, a small village in the province of Viterbo, where he lived and worked during his second artistic season. In recent years the importance of his work has been recognized and consecrated internationally. The personal and anthological exhibitions from Lia Rumma in Milan in 1999 (with which she inaugurates the Milanese space of the gallery), at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2001, at Kettle’s Yard in the University of Cambridge and by Greta Meert in Brussels in 2002, at the Galerie Di Meo in Paris in 2004, at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow in 2005; always from Lia Rumma in Naples in 2006 and from Haunch of Venison in New York in 2009 and 2012. The culmination of this remarkable exhibition curriculum was the conferral by Prince Hitachi, Honorary Patron of the Japan Art Association, of the Imperial Praemium for the painting, the highest artistic recognition internationally. The artist died in Viterbo in 2017.