64 Years of Art in DIFC

Jan 19th - April 30th

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Featured artists

GIANNI BERTINI
(Pisa, Italy 1922 – Caen, France 2010)

Gianni Bertini was an Italian artist active in the field of painting, graphics and visual poetry. Graduated in mathematics at the University of Pisa, he was a great interpreter of informal painting of the fifties and sixties in Paris, where he lived for long periods of his life. The same painting that he personalized with the characteristic gesture of bertinisation, that hat to be translated as the conceptualization of his typical pictorial gesture, anticipated in a certain sense the adhesion to Mechanical Art (Mec Art) theorized by the French critic Pierre Restany in 1965.Among others, the French, Alain Jaquet and Pol Bury and the Italians Mimmo Rotella, Aldo Tagliaferro, Bruno Di Bello and Elio Mariani. In Mec Art, the painting was surpassed and the artists were related to the mechanical images coming from the new media that were spreading in the new society: television, magazines, cinema. These images were brought back with the technique of emulsified canvas and transported on canvas and mixed with painting, using the photographic medium as the most relevant to represent the profound iconographic changes in the age of images. Mec Art's first exhibition in Italy was at the Galleria Blu in Milan in 1966, curated by Pierre Restany. Animated by "invincible narcissism, barely corrected by a pinch of self-irony", throughout the sixties he produced works of considerable impact and aggressiveness in Paris, on themes such as consumerism, fashion, sex, spatial conquests and other clichés of contemporary society, consisting of photographic collages with increasingly minor pictorial interventions.Since the 80's, after about a decade of misleading experiments, Bertini's works recall the ironic and dynamic inspiration of the early years, based on the contamination between painting and graphic and photographic reproduction. He took part in the XXIX Venice Biennale in 1958 and with a personal room at the XXXIV edition in 1964. He took part in the IX, X and XI editions of the Quadriennale di Roma (1965, 1972, 1986).

Bertini died in Caen in 2010 at the age of 88 years.

REMO BIANCO
(* Milan, Italy 1922 – Milan, Italy 1988)

Remo Bianco, birth name Remo Bianchi, (3 June 1922 – 23 February 1988) was an Italian painter and sculptor. In 1937 Bianco enrolled evening courses at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, where he met Francesco De Pisis two years later and began to attend the Master's studio regularly; there he had the opportunity to meet other artists such as Carrà, Sironi, Savinio, Soffici, Soldati, Marini, Cantatore. Bianco, rescued by the British, was interned in Tunisia where he experienced his first contact with the Middle East. In 1944 he returned to Milan where he resumed his contacts with Filippo de Pisis and his studies at the Brera Academy. In this period his works are strongly similar to the existential expressism of the French painter Rouault, notably the self-portrait which he painted in 1945. In his paintings large and dark lines begin to enclose thick layers of leaden and sulphurous colour. From the 50s, Bianco's portraits become increasingly speckled and the brushstrokes more disorderly, while the colours are reduced in thickness. From the Nuclear Movement (founded in Milan in 1951), Bianco learned the love for materials. In his works, the features of the faces become increasingly imperceptible, giving way to paint blends. His next progression was more radical, a composition of pigments, glass crystals, paint, glue, iridescent paste, and pebbles. On the contrary, from Spatialism he captured the more creative, experimental, ironic and Dadaist dimension, taking interest in the materialistic trace and chromatic writing. The paintings are almost completely free of figures and become a layer of threads and paint strokes. French critic Pierre Restany wrote: "We should not forget that Remo Bianco was formed during the post - WWII period in the Milanese school of spatialism of Lucio Fontana and Carlo Cardazzo from which he drew the double lesson of energy and eclecticism - in one word, liberty". Successively he held many exhibitions at Cavallino and Naviglio galleries, up to the 80s. In the USA Bianco learned abstract expressionism directly by Jackson Pollock, but he did not lose his love for proportions and order, starting to give life to his Collages. Papers (or fabrics), again painted with signs and drippings, are cut in small squares, mixed together and recomposed as a collage or a mosaic. It is from the development of Collages that Bianco came to create his most well known artworks: the Tableaux dorés. This category is not only his the most numerous one but also the richest in creativity; each one is unique for his colours and the amount and extent of gold leaf used. Even where small amounts of gold leaf are used the artwork does not lose its power and eloquence, but gains in mystery and profundity.

Remo Bianco died in Milan in 1988.

JAMES BROWN
(* Los Angeles, USA - 1951)

James Brown, born in 1951, is an American-born painter now active in Paris and Oaxaca (Mexico). He was well known in the 1980s for his semi-figurative paintings, bearing affinities to Jean Michel Basquiat and East Village painting of the time, but with influences from primitive art and classical Western modernism. Born in Los Angeles, California, he received a BFA from Immaculate Heart College, Hollywood. He then spent years in Paris, and attended the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts, Paris - France. He rebelled against the classical training there, which he considered irrelevant, but stayed as he wanted to stay in Paris. Tours of Europe seeing renaissance and especially medieval painting of Italy influenced his work. During the 80's his paintings were a mix between modernist tradition and adherence to the picture surface with clear influences from tribal art. In the early 1980s he began exhibiting in New York, and in this decade this work became a hit in the galleries and art press, sharing a look with the Bad Painting and young neo - expressionism of the East Village painters of the time. His work has taken on several styles over the years, but maintains a hand-made look combining the concerns of the modernist tradition with the motifs and spiritual interests from tribal art. Much of his work is non-realistic but contains depictions or signs of recognizable faces or objects. More recently he has done more in an abstract mode. However, the line between representation and abstraction is often a difficult one in his work, such as his more recent "Firmament Series" – abstract canvases that can also be read as referring to constellations or stars, or groups of rocks. Besides paintings Brown has also produced sculptures and series of prints at various points in his career, and in the 1990's he started to heavily utilize collage. Drawing and other unique works on paper have been important to his artistic development and production. In an Artforum review of a 25-year retrospective, Martha Schwendener noted “The works range from abstract gouaches to biomorphic and figurative watercolors to collages that update the synthetic Cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque.” James Brown has shown in many galleries from the early 1980s to the present. He has shown across the United States and Europe, as well as other places in the world, and since 1999 increasingly in Mexico. Several of his prints and paintings are included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

CARLO BUZZI
(*Busto Arsizio, Italy 1969)

Carlo Buzzi is an Italian artist, known for his work in the urban context. He uses the tools of advertising. Normally he works on interventions involving the urban context, using the common typographic poster. A significant number of posters is exposed in public posting. The procedure is then documented photographically. The work is then formalized through the production of a limited number of pictures. Carlo Buzzi made the first public operation in 1990, in collaboration with gallery owner Luciano Inga-Pin in Milan. It involved the purchase of a page in the magazine Flash Art. This page showed the image of an ordinary toilet brush, with the word «PICASSO» on the top and the writing 20-22 hours at the bottom of it. In 1991 the same subject was represented in the streets of Milan on a poster, with a regular posting. Formal construction (simulation of «fake event») and praxis (exposure with regularly paid taxes, never without authorization indicate the desire of the artist to break into the public arena on tip- toe, as opposed to the ideological connotations that characterize some contemporary or previous works, made in the same sphere by other artists. Later on, due to a gradual «appropriation» of the media used by the artist, a more radical form of communication has been developed. In 1994, a poster appeared showing with the presence of a simple single image reproducing his back to a half-length with no writing on it. The artist never decides to expose only a few copies of the posters, since his aim is to show his work to the whole city (or to some limited areas, when operating in very big urban centers). Between content (in reference to what he shows in the posters) and praxis (aim for artistic action – or part of it – outside of the traditional «withe cube»), the second is definitely much more important and crucial for him.

ANGELO CAGNONE
(*Carcare, Italy 1941)

Angelo Cagnone was born in 1941 in Carcare is an Italian painter, described as conceptual artist. In Albissola (Italy) he frequented various artists, including Lucio Fontana. In 1961 he decided to dedicate himself entirely to painting, moving to Milan. In 1963 some of his paintings sent to the Venetian gallery of Cavallino were bought by Peggy Guggenheim. In 1964 he exhibited for the first time at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto; his pictorial conception remained halfway between the figurative and the abstract. In 1965 he held his first solo show in Milan at the Galleria del Naviglio, and some paintings were bought by Buzzati. In 1972 he exhibited at the Biennale internationale d'art de Menton, in the same year he exhibited at the X quadriennale in Rome, in 1980 at the Edward Totah gallery in London, and was reviewed abroad. He lives and works between Milan and Altare and April 2008 is his last important exhibition in the exhibition space of the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua; especially on this occasion his passion for the theme of memory that passes through the unconscious was revealed. His works are kept at the Galleria d'arte moderna in Milan, at the museum of the Michetti Foundation, his works are in the collection of the Parisi-Valle museum in Maccagno, one of his works in profile is in the Biblioteca Civica Alessandro Manzoni. With his mind and senses Cagnone immerses himself in the secrets of the special harmonic relationships that Mantegna dropped into the stone and from there he distills works that are immediately transformed into a dialoguing text, available to the most daring space-time suggestions. Mantegna's house, a place of encounter and confrontation, a space perpetually alive, thus underlines once again its eccentric geometric perfection, its metaphysical propensity to fascinate and involve artists of every generation and trend. It is from this love that different reading proposals have been born in an always original reading have been created because the possibilities that artists have in comparing their sensibilities with what the house and its prodigious inventor are able to arouse are endless. During his early exhibitions, in the mid-sixties, Angelo Cagnone was appreciated for the singular character of his images, suspended on the ridge of everyday representation and surreal imagination.

GIUSEPPE CHIARI
(Florence, Italy 1926 – Florence, Italy 2007)

Giuseppe Chiari was born in Florence in 1926. After studying engineering, in 1947 he began his musical activity and in 1950 he began to compose. In 1961 with Pietro Grossi he founded the association Vita Musicale Contemporanea. In 1962 he joined the international and interdisciplinary group Fluxus, born in the USA to promote George Maciunas and based on alternative behavior and continuous encroachments of the languages's peculiarity. In 1963 his pièce Teatrino was played in New York as part of a series of concerts organized by Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik. He later took part in Group 70 for the musical part. He published the book Musica senza controppunto (Music without counterpoint) in 1969 and Senza Titolo in 1971. In 1970 he stopped composing and began an intense activity of concerts, performances, conferences that took him, among others, to Berlin, London, Paris, Vienna, Milan, Venice, Rome, New York. Thanks to his production, today he is considered one of the most important Italian Fluxus artist in the international field. Within the group Fluxus he experimented with the concept of visual music by combining visual and musical art in a continuum where music is characterized by its visual component. He took part in numerous exhibitions all around the world, some of which are worth mentioning here, such as the X° Quadriennale di Roma, the International Art Exhibition in Venice in 1972, 1976, 1974, Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 and the Biennale of Sydney in 1990. Numerous personal exhibitions were held both before and after the master's death, some of the most important of which are worth mentioning: the one held at the "Careof DOCVA" Centre for the documentation of visual arts in Milan in 2009 entitled Giuseppe Chiari, the 2011 performance exhibition held at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome curated by Achille Bonito Oliva for the project FLUXUS BIENNIAL; that of 2013 at the Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art entitled A proposito di Giuseppe Chiari , the one held in 2014 at Palazzo Tagliaferro in Andora entitled Giuseppe Chiari - Gli anni dell'avanguardia e oltre, the one held in 2015 at the Diotti Museum entitled Giuseppe Chiari - Quit Classic Music, the anthological exhibition held at Miart in Milan in 2016. His works are kept in many museums like the permanent collection of Palazzo Fabroni in Pistoia, the Museo Novecento in Florence, the Museo Sperimentale d'Arte contemporanea dell'Aquila (Italy) and the MAMBO Museum in Bologna (Italy).

Giuseppe Chiari died in Florence in May 2007.

LUCIO DEL PEZZO
(*Napels, Italy 1933)

Lucio Del Pezzo was born in Naples on December 13, 1933. After studying as a land surveyor, he attended the free school of drawing, history of art and archaeology of Mario Napoli and in 1954 he won a scholarship for archaeological research in Greece. In 1955 he graduated from the State Art Institute of Naples and attended, as a student of Emilio Notte, the painting course at the Academy of Fine Arts of the city. In Naples he founded Group 58 with Guido Biasi, Bruno Di Bello, Sergio Fergola, Luca (Luigi Castellano) and Mario Persico, this group can be considered one of the most extreme experiences of the Italian avant-garde of the 20th century. It stands art for its absolute design autonomy: during those years art was analized thorugh the interpretation of the society and it was considered rational and commercial logic in a way that it tended to consider every aspect of life. It questions all those expressions of creativity linked to the stylistic features of nineteenth-century painting, turning instead to the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century, in particular Dadaism and Surrealism, and then to the Neodadaism of the 50s. The Centre National d'Art Contemporaine commissioned Lucio Del Pezzo to renovate the garden of the Hotel de Rotschild in Paris. He is invited with other artists to the World People's Festival in Cuba, with the sculpture "The Tomb of Marat" (1969). The University of Parma dedicated to him the first of painting and sculpture curated by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and began the collaboration with Olivetti, for special graphic designs (1970). He became teacher at the Faculty of Applied Psychology of Sorbonne and assistant to the Art Ateliers (1971). The Centre Beaubourg-Pompidou commissioned him to paint a large painting covering the two sides of the construction site of the centre (The Wall, 1973). The City of Milan dedicated to him an anthology of paintings and sculptures at the Rotonda della Besana, proposed by Guido Ballo (1974). The Centre Beaubourg-Pompidou entrusted him with an animation stage on the theatre for his Atelier des Enfants (1976). Today Lucio Del Pezzo is recognized worldwide as an artist capable of mixing the colors of pop art and the geometry of conceptual art.

LENNIO FINZI
(*Venice, Italy 1931)

Ennio Finzi was born in Venice 1931 and he had been interested in painting and music since his childhood. He attended some courses at the Venice Art Institute and was attracted by the fascinating discovery of the structural upheaval of Cubism, which allowed him to transcend the real datum of representation. At the Biennale of 1948, the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts reopened in Venice and this gave him the opportunity to dedicate himself to the study of the masters of the historical avant-garde. The meeting with Atanasio Soldati, generated a stimulus that influenced his subsequent works characterized by bright colors and rigorous formal balances. Thus were born the first inventions in which rhythm, color, light, timbre, assume the role of supporting elements and will become a basic constant in all his research. In those years Virgilio Guidi exerted considerable influence on Finzi for the ideological force of creative thought and Emilio Vedova for the impetus of the gesture that attacked the surface. The discovery of dodecaphonic music taught him the principle of dissonance. Suddenly, in this way, the practice of a colour dissolved from any relation of tone and loaded with the exclusive function of timbre, opened new and vast horizons, so much so that from that moment and until the end of the 1950s his work turned out to be an obsessive research on the semantics of gesture, light, timbre. At the end of the 1950s, marked by the shocking intuitions of Lucio Fontana, whom Finzi met in Milan on the occasion of one of his exhibitions at the Apollinaire gallery, gestural turbulence and expressive urgency calmed down and a more reflective dimension took over in the direction of overcoming painting itself, with the approach to gestalt theories on the phenomenology of perception. The principles of optical art influenced his research on optical suggestion until 1978. In 1980 painting re-conquered the dominant space with a subsequent alternation of colour and non-colour, of light and darkness competing for the surface of the work. The black is placed like the light of darkness, emptiness, silence and leads him to probe the most secret resonances of the non-existent on the invisibility of the painting itself. In the continuous dialectic that distinguishes the principle of research, Finzi proceeds through successive stages of evolution characterized by expansions of chromatic sumptuousness and sudden zeroing of every luminosity in which every energy emission is concentrated in its potential state.

GIORGIO GRIFFA
(* Turin – April 1936)

Giorgio Griffa is an Italian abstract painter, currently living and working in Turin (Italy). Unlike his colleagues, Griffa never studied art. He started painting as a child, taking inspiratio from local painters at the Circolo degli Artisti in Turin. Giorgio Griffa in fact studied law, becoming a practicing lawyer immediately afterwards. This work, however, never really convinced the artist, who decided to start his artistic career in the sixties by becoming assistant to the Italian painter Filippo Scroppo, a member of MAC (Arte Concreta). In 1968, Giorgio Griffa abandoned figurative painting in favor of abstract painting that during his career will characterize his artwork. Painting with acrylic on un-stretched canvas and burlap and linen: these are just some of the distinctive features of Giorgio Griffa's art. When they were not exhibited, the works were folded and stacked up, creating creases and underlying grid on his paintings. To keeping with his idea that painting is continuous and never finished, many of his works display a deliberate endpoint that has been described as stopping a thought midsentence. Despite early associations with movements such as Arte Povera and Minimalism, Giorgio Griffa's works were not exhibited in the USA for 40 years after his first solo exhibition in New York at Ileana Sonnabend's Gallery. In 2012, Giorgio Griffa had a solo exhibition titled Fragments 1968 – 2012 at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York. Unfortunately, his exhibition was interrupted by Hurricane Sandy and later reopened in 2013. After the exhibition at Ileana Sonnabend Gallery, Griffa participated to important international exhibitions such as Prospekt, Düsseldorf (1969 and 1974) and the Venice Biennale (1978 and 1980). Other important early exhibitions include Processes of Visualized Thought: Young Italian Avant-garde at Kunstmuseum Luzern (1970) and A Painting Exhibition of Painters who Place Painting in Question at Stadtische Museum in Monchengladbach (1973). Recent solo presentations of Giorgio Griffa's works include Uno e Due at Galleria Civica d'Art Moderna e Contemporanea inTurin (2002), at the MACRO Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2011), and at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Gèneve (2015). Today Giorgio Griffa is permanently present in some of the world's most important collections, including: GAM (Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) in Turin, Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Rome, Museo del Novecento in Milan, MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Rome.

PAOLO GONZATO
(*Milan, Italy 1975)

Paolo Gonzato lives and works in Milan. He attended courses in decoration and art history at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, pursuing his career as an artist. For years he has moved freely between art and design, ignoring any rigidity of definition. When we met him, we asked him about his relationship with ceramics, past and present. The work of Paolo Gonzato seems to be rooted in this concept, it is a continuous search for the primeval element, that he modifies, to make an intrinsic and atavistic order resurface. Gonzato is looking for the peculiar characteristic of the material, the most obvious, which he strips and redefines to return it to a new contemporaneity. He does small corrections or great revolutions, continuous researches to attempt to give order to the natural chaos. The distortion rediscover the essence of woods, fabrics, poor materials and design. An eternal process that contrasts and redefines the will of a planned process. For Mandranova In Residence Gonzato stages a contradictory theater. Plastic sheets, used for packaging, are the ennobled support of large oil paintings where the figure of the rhombus towers over, a modular polygon and simple symbol of the endless possibility of re-creation. The rhombus becomes white as an archetype of the architecture brutally finished that often characterizes the surrounding area and chromatic diary of colour fields taken from the native vegetation. The proliferation of colour is the memory of the agave, of the palm, of the almond trees that relies on the wooden polygons and on the beams piled up. He creates a precarious and harmonious structure with tables of various sizes and colours, a controlled implosion that evokes the spontaneous and chaotically perfect design of the sophisticated twine of leaves and vegetable species. Nature gets free to return compressed and arranged in patterns of leaves and plants realized with small lines of ballpoint pen. Looking for a perennial and unreachable configuration of the material, Gonzato says: “I am convinced that all the organized forms go towards disorder, towards the destruction of their systems.

KAWS
(New Jersey - *1974)

KAWS (1974, born Brian Donnelly) is an American artist and object designer. Since his childhood, KAWS showed his interest in Pop&Street Art. Already during primary school he began to develop his first artistic experiments, painting graffiti on walls within his community. Over the years his stylistic technique was refined thanks to the great interest that the artist showed for the great painters, taking inspiration for example from models such as Gerhard Richter, Klaus Oldenberg and Chuck Close. KAWS' career officially began in 1990 when New York began to be carpeted with his graffiti. In the same year the artist began his limited-edition toy production. The latter increased his popularity, especially in Asia. In 1996 he obtained the BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and soon after he started working as a freelance artist for Disney. Thanks to this work KAWS was able to reach such a popularity that his drawings and cartoons became a real brand all over the world. From that moment the artist began to work actively all over the world, including Paris, London, Germany, Japan, USA, Italy, etc. The growth of the artist and his globalization was also helped by the significant number of collaborations. One of the most important achievement was in 2014 when Kaws designed the bottle artwork for the scent Girl by Comme des Garçons and Pharrell Williams, 2016 when he collaborated with clothing store Uniqlo to produce a line of T-shirts and accessories that were priced cheaply, 2017 when Nike subsidiary Jordan Brand released a capsule collection in collaboration with Kaws - Air Jordan four sneakers customized by Kaws, and a number of apparel pieces, etc. As a consequence of this popularity, in recent years there has been a significant increase of the value of the artist in the art market. In May 2017, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City released limited supplies of the $200 Kaws Companion action figure, resulting in the MoMA Design Store website crashing due to the unprecedented rush of traffic. In May 2017, UK auction house Phillips sold a Kaws Seated Companion (2011) bronze sculpture for approximately $411,000 USD. His last record at auction dates back to April 2019, when his work THE KAWS ALBUM (a parody painting that ironically covers the 1967 Beatles record, represented as Simpsons) was sold by Sotheby's in Hong Kong for $14.8 million. Today all his limited edition productions are sold out after a few hours. Today KAWS is one of the world's most innovative and highly regarded contemporary artists and boasts solo exhibitions in major museums around the world including The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT, the Harris Museum in Preston, UK, the Parco Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, and the City Gallery Chastain in Atlanta.

LINO TAGLIAPIETRA
(* Murano, Italy – 1934)

Lino Tagliapietra was born in Murano in 1934 in Italy and became an apprentice glassblower at the age of 11. Lino showed an immense ability for glass and was appointed the title of “Maestro”, an honor reserved for only the best glassblowers, when he was just 21. In 1979, Lino visited Seattle for the first time and introduced the Pilchuck Glass School students to the long tradition of Venetian glassblowing. This cross-cultural collaboration helped shape the identity of American glassblowing and offered Lino an opportunity to expand his horizons internationally. Then in his 80's, with over 70 years of experience, the Maestro divides the time between Murano and Seattle. He continues to exerciese his prodigious technical skill and creative experimentation, producing works that both inspire and amaze. The artist's Seattle Studio, the epicenter of Lino's artworks in the Pacific Northwest, underwent a renovation in 2016 and is now a gallery housing a selection of these incredible creations. Lino Tagliapietra is represented at an array of galleries across the United States. Those galleries include: Austin Art Projects, Hawk Galleries, Heller Gallery, Holsten Galleries, Montague Gallery and Schantz Galleries. Throughout his career the master had international exhibitions in the world's most important museums including: The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Tokyo national Modern Art Museum in Japan, Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Palazzo Grassi in Venice and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. His career has also been rewarded with countless awards including: Best Glass Work Award in 2015 (London), Career Award Istituto Veneto di Scienze in Venice (2015), Visionary Award in Palm Beach Florida (2013) and was the Technical Director of Effetre International in Murano, Italy from 1976-1989.

UMBERTO MARIANI
(Modena, Italy 1897 – Milan, Italy 1980)

Umberto Mariani (Milan, 16 November 1936) is an Italian artist and painter.

Mariani completed his artistic studies, first at the Liceo Artistico and then at the Accademia di Brera, where he became Achille Funi's assistant.

In the years between 1959 and 1965, he closely collaborated with his master in the realization of numerous, magnificent decorative frescoes. He also collaborates on the altarpiece of San Giuseppe in the Basilica of San Pietro in Rome (central altar in the left transept). Through these experiences he acquires the skill to work on a large scale, a skill he will use in the years to follow.

From 1990, Mariani began to work from the subject of drapery that he is passionate about, and creates in his works known as I Piombi a stylized and geometrized idea of this subject matter. The drapery loses all the forms, and the works were crystallize in straight lines, to be intended as symbolic visions. In 2011, the exhibition Le Vesti di Saturno is held in the prestigious halls of the Medici Gallery in Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence. The solo exhibition entitled Recent Works-Piombi followed in 2013 in the Baroque Spaces of the Sala San Ignazio in Arezzo and later that year, the anthological exhibition Umberto Mariani-Opere 1967-2013 (catalogue edited by Allemandi) took place in the Chiostri di San Domenico in Reggio Emilia. Opera Gallery, present with twelves offices located over 5 continents, sign an exclusive contract to organize shows of Mariani's work in Paris, New York and Hong-Kong.

The exhibition Arte ribelle - 1960/1970 - Artisti del ‘68 takes place in the exhibition halls of the bank Credito Valtellinese in Milan with three large works by the master. The exhibition then moved to Fano at the Galleria Carifano later that year. During 2018 and 2019, three major museums hosted the solo travelling exhibition Frammenti da Bisanzio: the National Museum of Ravenna, followed by the Museums of San Salvatore in Lauro in Rome and finally at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, in the Palace of the General Staff. At the beginning of 2019, the artist was awarded by the Centro Studi Grande Milano at Palazzo Isimbardi, the Grandi Guglie honor, for his role as an Ambassador of Milanese culture in the world..

ANGEL ORTIZ (LA II)
(* New York, USA – 1967)

LA II (Angel Ortiz), born in 1967, is an American Pop and graffiti artist.

Appreciated for his unique blend of influences ranging from Chinese calligraphy to pictograph-like cave paintings, his oeuvre is characterized by its bright colors and energetic scrawl. Born Angel Oritz in 1967 in New York, NY, he grew up in a Puerto Rican family living in the Baruch housing project.

He adopted the moniker LA II, which stands for Little Angel, and began tagging at early age. “I was 10 when I first started tagging. The street was my canvas”, he once explaine, and continued “I lived on the Lower East Side, and so those were the streets that I hit.” Ortiz met Keith Haring while tagging at the age of 13 in 1980, and the two quickly became friends and collaborators, influencing each other’s technique and style. Ortiz has used all kinds of techniques in his works. He worked as a fisherman while attending at mechanical engineer school in 1988. He became a licensed navigator and certified scuba diver. Furthermore, he travelled to other countries such as Canada in 1991, Cuba in 1992; He became a freelance designer and photographer in 1993 in the United States, and Europe 2001-2004 to enrich his art techniques.

To Angel, it is important to try toreach a huge level of excellence in order to contribute to art and to art education. Angel is an artist employs all forms of exploration and celebration of beauty in all its manifestations. He strives to create unique artoworks that stir the mind, delight the eye. Ortiz travelled around the world with Haring, acting as his assistant and contributing to many of the famous artist’s installation paintings, usually by filling the spaces between Haring’s lines with his own mixture of densely packed symbols.

Since the untimely death of Haring from AIDS at the age 31, Oritz has continued his own career despite often being overlooked within art history and Haring’s legacy in particular. In 2008, he famously tagged his name in a restored Haring outdoor mural without permission. Today, Ortiz’s works are in the collections of Pepperdine University in Malibu, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others. Ortiz lives and works in New York, NY.

IDEO PANTALEONI
(Legano, Italy 1904 – Milan, Italy 1993)

Ideo Tommaso Pantaleoni (Legnago, 12 October 1904 - Milan, 25 December 1993) was an Italian painter, sculptor and lithographer.

Considered one of the masters of 20th century painting, he is one of the first artists to join the Concrete Art Movement (M.A.C.), he took part in many group exhibitions organized by the Movement during the decade of activity from 1948 to 1958 in Ferrara he attended schools until he graduated at the Dosso Dossi Art Institute. Later in Bologna he attended the Academy of Fine Arts.

In 1923 he moved to Milan, he came into contact with the artistic environment; Milan in those years was the cardinal point in the geography of art and culture and he came into contact with the great masters of the time De Pisis, Carrà and Sironi, who helped him to understand the "artistic craft", compositional mastery, technical expertise and chromatic consonances, combining it with experimentation with new techniques, helping him to enrich his works with new forms and subjects for him. In Rapallo in 1940 he met Bianca Magri who later became his companion and wife for an entire life; in 1943 his studio in Via Fontana in Milan was bombed, he lost all his works preserved until that date and was forced to leave the city to take refuge in Ligurno di Cantello in the province of Varese until the end of the war.

Once back in Milan, he joined the M.A.C. Movement. Together with Atanasio Soldati, Gillo Dorfles, Gianni Monnet and Bruno Munari, but he continued to go back to Paris, where he had developed his relationships with artists such as Klein, Poliakoff, Pillet, Hartung, Atlan, Seuphor, Huber, Dewasne and gallerists such as Monsieur Guy Resse of the Galerie La Roue. During those years he was also present at the exhibitions of the group Réalités Nouvelles where he was awarded as Honorary Member. Also in Italy he participated in important national exhibitions such as the XXIV Venice Biennale in 1948, the X Triennale in Milan in 1954. Since 1957 he gradually moved away from abstract- concrete painting to approach new structures of "abstract-informal" imprint that denote a new pictorial rigour, developing chromatic effects of transparencies on superimposed planes. In Paris he was called the Maître des Gris. In 1958 the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris acquired the work "Composition" of 1958 in a permanent collection. In 1962 his research moved to abstract-gestual, high quality works were born, now very rare as they are dispersed in various private collections and museums. Three of these works were exhibited in 1965 at the IX Quadriennale in Rome. His works are today in the largest museum collections at international level and exhibitions all over the world continue to give value to his production.

Pantaleoni died in Milan in 1993.

CESARE PEVERELLI
(Milan, Italy 1922 – Paris, Frace 2000)

Cesare Peverelli was born in Milan in 1922.
He studied the Brera Academy (Milan) and had a passion for music.

The artist began to exhibit in 1941 and then participated in numerous group exhibitions (Venice Biennale, Quaternary of Rome, Salone di Mai, etc.).
In 1946 Peverelliwas a fierce opponent of the fascist regime and he was a signatory of the manifesto Guernica by Pablo Picasso. In 1951, he joined the space group (Lucio Fontana, Roberto Crippa, Gianni Dova, Benjamin Joppolo, Antonino Tullier, etc.) and signed the fourth and fifth manifesto. He settled in Paris in 1957, came into contact with painters such as Roberto Matta, Bernard Saby, Enrique Zanartu and met several writers.

In 1967 he participated in the exhibition Signs of a surrealist awakening organized in Brussels by Patrick Waldberg. Peverelli, who discovered the works of Otto Wols and Pollock, practiced gestural automatism for a while in the early 50s.
He participated 3 times in the Venice Biennale in 1948, in 1950 and the last one in 1960 with no less than 13 works. In 1960 the Venice Biennale dedicated a personal room to him. He took part in the 8th, 9th and 10th editions of the Quadriennale di Roma.

In 1972 the City of Milan dedicated an anthological exhibition to him at Palazzo Reale. In 1976 and 1979 the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris organized important exhibitions. In 1996 the Società per le Belle Arti e Esposizioni Permanente organised an exhibition of his work, curated by Flaminio Gualdoni. The artist is therefore deliberately linked to surrealism. The Museum of Modern Art in the city of Paris in 1976 offered him more rooms to exhibit his works. Cesare Peverelli died in Seillans (Var, France) in 2000.

FABRIZIO PLESSI
(* Reggio Emilia, Italy – 1940)

Fabrizio Plessi was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy in 1940.

He completed his studies at the Art High School and the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice where he later held the chair of painting. In 1968 he began to focus his artistic research on the theme of water, which he presented in installations, films, videotapes and performances.

A few years later his talent began to be recognized worldwide and his works were exhibited at the experimental pavilion of the XXXV Venice Art Biennale in 1970 and at the following edition in 1972. A year later, in 1973, on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Galleria Vinciana in Milan, the theme Acquabiografico (Aquabiography) was presented, which gathered together on the natural elements and especially on water.

He began to perform a series of performance actions documented by photographs and video footage.
He begins to collaborate with the Visual Activities Centre of Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, where with his instrumentation made available by the Centre he creates the first videotapes.

As early as 1968, his multidisciplinary practice concentrated in particular on water, that became of the main theme of his works. Plessi was drawn to the element for its primordial and mystical associations. Since the 1980s, Plessi began to meditate on our relationships between art and technology and our relationship with the environment both built and natural. He began integrating his images of elemental forces like water, fire and lava with large-scale “terrestrial” constructions of stone and wood. By capturing the elements and juxtaposing them with the built environment, he questions our ideas about history, memory, and landscapes.

Ifrom this years Plessi touched the peak of his success. In the same years, he exhibited in numerous public spaces in Italy and abroad, including: Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara (1975), Städtische Galerieim Lenbachhaus in Munich (1979), the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum in Antwerp (1975-1978-1980) and the Palaisdes Beaux Arts in Brussels (1975,1983), Centre Pompidou in Paris (1982). In 1980 he participated in the Venice Film Festival with the film Liquid Movie, winning the "City of Milan" Award. In 1982 his work Underwater video was presented at the Centre Pompidou, Beaubourg in Paris. From this year on, his works closely touch the environmental nature of the possibilities of video, incorporating three-dimensional structures. The illusionistic relationship between representation and reality of the liquid element appears amplified in the extreme technological possibilities of mechanical and electronic reproduction. In 1987, at Documenta 8 in Kassel Plessi's Documenta 8, he presented the monumental installation Roma, which made him definitively known internationally. In Bologna he won the international award "L'immagine elettronica" and created the set designs for Sciame by Enzo Cosimi, who inaugurated the Rovereto Festival.

In the same year is the extensive review of his video installations in Cavaillon on the occasion of the Festival d'Avignon. His career traces one of the most important museum realities in the world, breaking any geographical limit.

WALTER PUPPO
(*Italy, 1957)

Walter Puppo is an Italian artist born in 1957.

Walter's paintings need to be watched with great attention. Being animated by a silent life, they remain mute to the assaults of a hasty consideration, while, with the modesty and determination they create a total balance and deep. They know how to reveal to those who stop and stay to observe; how to be revealed to those worlds, both geological and stellar, moved by a perennial imperceptible musical movement, a slow universal dance in which we ourselves are called to participate almost without realizing it.

"This is how the "cells" were born: the synthetic, elongated, frontal form, by the artist's admission, refers "to archaic visions, stones, islands and organisms closely linked to nature", but as it happens to forms and symbols left for a long time to settle in memory, what remains of their existence is only the imprint, the abraded and almost weightless trace; nor could it be otherwise, I thought a few years ago, in the condition of fragmentation and loneliness of the present; therefore "cells" as cuttlefish bones of the contemporary world.

MAURO REGGIANI
(Modena, Italy 1897 – Milan, Italy 1980)

Mauro Reggiani (Nonantola, 11 August 1897 - Milan, 20 May 1980) was an Italian painter.

Immediately after World War I he became friends with the painters Carlo Dalmazzo Carrà, Achille Funi and Pietro Marussig. In Paris, where he went in 1926 and 1930, he met Vassily Kandinsky, Alberto Magnelli, Jean Arp and Max Ernst. He took part in the first exhibition of Italian abstractionism organized in 1934 at the Galleria del Milione in Milan.

He was one of the signatories of the first manifesto of Abstractionism and a passionate advocate of new openings of art and new relationships more consistent with foreign avant-garde culture.

In Turin, in 1935, he exhibited in the gallery of Casorati and Paulucci. In 1938, he was commissioned to fresco the church of the Villaggio Battisti in Cyrenaica.
He took part in the major national and foreign exhibitions until the forced parenthesis of inactivity due to the second war. After the war he returned to Milan and exhibited with the group of Gillo Dorfles, Bruno Munari, Mario Radice, Manlio Rho and Atanasio Soldati.

In 1960 he participated in the historical exhibition of abstractionism Construction and Geometry in Painting, held in New York. He was awarded at the Venice Biennale and then, in 1965, won the first prize at the Quadriennale d'Arte in Rome. In 1982 he took part in the collective exhibition Maestri e Giovani in the Centro d'Arte Cultura e Costume in Via Manzoni 45, Milan, with a posthumous presence, together with Ottone Rosai, Attilio Alfieri, Virgilio Guidi, the young Lino Riccardi and Nino Bonacina, Ernesto Treccani, Domenico Purificato, Remo Brindisi, Tonino Scuccimarra, Galliano Mazzon, among others.

Reggiani is one of the most significant figures of a precise moment in Italian culture, when those aspirations and trends of renewal that put it in agitation, harnessed by the heavy yoke of the historical moment, originated. He can be considered the pioneer of abstractionism in Italy together with Alberto Magnelli, Enrico Prampolini, Atanasio Soldati. He rests in Milan, at the Cemetery of Lambrate. Reggiani's abstract vision takes place with consistent and rigorous evolution, always linked to a formal discipline that rejects all decorative complacency.

The artist tends towards a search for absolute expression through the representation of geometric shapes enhanced by an inventive graphic imagination of effective originality. Shapes and relationships of colour are aimed at a spiritual aspiration, to which the artist tends through a meditated organic architecture of vision.
Numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad during the 1960s and 1970s were dedicated to the artist who was celebrated as one of the most important representatives of Italian abstract and concrete art.

Mauro Reggiani died on 20 May 1980 in Milan.

GIAMPIERO ROMANO
(*Milan, Italy - 1973)

Giampiero Romanó, born in 1973 in Milan, is an Italian artist and restorer.

He doesn't train at design courses or attending an Academy of Arts, but among the nails, hammers and paints of his workshop, in the heart of the Porta Venezia district, dedicating himself for more than twenty years to the research and restoration of vintage-design pieces.

Since the early years he travels a lot in search of vintage pieces of the great Italian names of design, making a culture in the field, tools in hand; his became an irresistible passion.
A few years later he started collaborating with Toiletpaper Magazine and his creativity, combined with a great experience, takes shape, bringing his works to be original and recognizable.

Giampiero thus embarked on the path of creating a line of customized mirrors and furnishing accessories, whose name well renders the concept that the artist wants to express: Antichità 3000.

Ironic, visionary and endowed with a great manual skill, developed over years of craftsmanship, Giampiero begins to give voice to his ideas and inspirations, creating an alternative universe made of mirrors.
These are in fact the protagonists of his creations: mirrors. Some he cuts them, others he sews them, disassembles them, illuminates them, riddles them.

One could try to interpret Giampiero Romanó's pieces of art as his search for identity; maybe so, but Giampiero does not allow himself time to stop and reflect: he has to create.

MIMMO ROTELLA
Catanzaro (Italy), 1918 – Milan (Italy), 2006

Domenico "Mimmo" Rotella was an Italian artist considered an important figure in post-war European art.

He is best known for his works of décollage and psychogeographics, made from torn advertising posters. He was the only Italian artist formally linked to the French Nouveau Réalistes artists, with whom he exhibited in the 1960s. Rotella studied art in Naples and held a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Missourti at Kansas City, where he was admired for his experimental phonetic poetry. In 1951, he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Chiurazzi in Rome. He returned to Italy in 1953 and abandoned painting for his signature décollages and assemblages, into which he incorporated textiles and other materials. In 1953, he suffered from an artistic crisis, and he interrupted his pictorial production.

Being convinced that there was nothing new to be done again in art, he suddenly had what he called a “Zen illumination":the discovery of the advertising poster as artistic expression of the city. In this way he started to experiment with Décollages (early collages): paste on canvas pieces of torn posters of the street, by adopting the collages of cubists and contaminating it with Dadaist array of ready made. In 1955, in Rome, in the exhibition "actual art exhibition", he exhibited the ‘torn poster’ for the first time. Later, he practiced the so-called double décollage: the poster was first removed from the billboard and then torn up in his studio. In those years he also made use of the retro d'affiche, using the posters pasted on the side and obtaining non-figurative and monochrome works. . Though initially abstract, after 1958, he created figurative décollage, and produced the Cinecittà series, using images from film posters. In 1961, he was invited by Pierre Restany to join the Nouveaux Réalistes group, and three years later, moved to Paris. In 1964, he was the Italian representative to the Venice Biennale.

The artist was experimental in his productions, scultural assemblage and collages, he broke the conventions of the materiality, in which the new and the old, the historical and the contemporary are united in an unique dimension. He moved to Paris in 1964 and still works on the definition of a new technique, Mec Art, with which he creates works using mechanical procedures on emulsified canvases. His first works of this kind were exhibited at Gallery J in Paris (1965).

In the 1980s, Rotella moved to Milan and started to produc his blanks, in which he covered the old posters with monochrom new sheets of paper. In 1984 he began painting, producing therefore the series Cinecittà 2 and Sovrapitture, in which he painted directly onto advertisements. He exhibited at the Centre Pompidou of Paris and at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1990, and at the Guggenheim Museum in 1994.

In 2000, the Foundation Mimmo Rotella opened, with the aim of promoting Contemporary Art and preserving the artist’s work.

Rotella died in Milan at the age of 87.

SANDRO CHIA
(* Florence – April 1956)

Sandro Chia is an Italian painter and a prominent figure of the Italian neo- Expressionist movement of the Transavanguardia with his friends Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino.

The aim of this movement was to recreate and re-emphasize the use of color and figurative representation in reaction to the Conceptual Art of the past years. Chia studied at the Accademia di Bella Arte in Florence and began exhibiting following his move to Rome. The paintings and sculptures by Sandro Chia are often brilliantly colored, mystical and symbolic compositions.

Offering an insight into contemporary social and political life through the formal language of Expressionism. In his art, Chia uses brushstrokes and violent gestures with charcoal and oils, treating his large canvases as vital elements to be worked upon.
Chia's early works tended towards Conceptualism, but from the mid – 1970s he began to turn towards more a figurative approach. In June 1979 the gallerist Paul Menz showed in his gallery the first artworks in a group show by Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Enzo Cucchi and Nicola De Maria.

His works were exhibited in many of the most important museums and galleries of the world. During his career, some of his main exhibitions include the Salomon Guggenheim Museum in 1983, the Metropolitan Museum of art (MET) in New York in 1984, the Venice Biennale in 1992, Villa Medici in Rome in 1997 and the Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna in Rome in 2009-10.

TRANSAVANGUARDE: the name is the Italian version of Neo-expressionism, an art movement that has been spread through Italy and the rest of Western Europe, in the late 1970s and 1980s. The term was coined by

the Italian art critis Achille Bonito Oliva in the text created fot the exhibition Le Stanze that he organized in 1979. The term, which literally means “beyond the avant-guarde” .
The term announces the beginning of an internationl phenomenon which took place in the most influential movements of Post War Italian art along with arte povera.

The main idea of this artists is to return to the traditional act of painting: they created paintings, drawings and sculptures that intentionally belonged to figurative art and employed neglected imaginary such as the mxthical symbols. According to Oliva, the movement relied heavily on the materialism of thecniques and new materials, rejecting the “catastrophe” enacted by conceptual ideas and recuperating the intensity of painting, the image and the narrative. For Oliva, the movement rejected the original avant-garde's “hysteria for the new” by returning to the syles of the past: colors, figurative, imagine of the man, landscapes, emotivity.

LUCA SCARABELLI
(*Varese, Italy 1965)

Luca Scarabelli, born in 1965 in Italy, is a conceptual artist.

His work focuses mainly on the sense of colour, conventions and the rhetoric of painting.
The objects are transformed into analyses of the nature of the human being and the use of consciousness. On several occasions his interest in the workings of artists has led him to collaborate and confront the art system also as an organizer of exhibitions and publishing initiatives.

Luca Scarabelli has exhibited in several solo exhibitions debuting in 1990 in Milan, followed by Bergamo, Genoa, Turin, Trieste, Bologna. On a worldwide level he has exhibited with the County College Art Gallery in Pittsburgh, with the Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery in Busto Arsizio and collaborated with the Republic of San Marino, with the Neon Gallery in Bologna and with the Museo della Permanente in Milan. His works are also present in the catalogue "Nuova scena" of 1995 edited by L. Beatrice.

Luca Scarabelli today lives and works in the province of Como, Italy.

TYLER SHIELDS
(* Jackonsville, USA – 1982)

Tyler Shields, born in 1982 in Jacksonville, Florida and now recognized as “Hollywood’s favorite photographer”, L.A.

Based contemporary artist and filmmaker Tyler Shields’ evolution from the “bad boy of photography” with his controversial blood-stained photographic series featuring Lindsay Lohan to the more subtle color-explosive poesy of his Chromatic series, and his work featuring Francesca Eastwood (Clint’s daughter), Mr. Shield’s art captures the emergence of an artist and his medium into a more mature overture and output. Tyler Shields is an American image- maker.

Shield’s technical brilliance as a photographer has much more to do with the shift in focus from the fragility of the “celebrity photographer” to the output of the contemporary art medium. Most of the talented people who work with him include actors who are serious about their profession, but are not celebrities. People will go to him to make art rather than celebrity photography.

As an artist, Shields’ work and output has much more to do with the long-standing and perhaps transcendental clarity behind controlled subconscious image-making in the vein of Caravaggio’s near photographic paintings in the 16th century, where rules and guidelines of the century were abandoned and / or re-incorporated to challenge the sensibilities of the time. In this regard, the artist’s work is as equally controversial with other image-makers who have utilized the tools of sex, death, flesh, obsession, nightmares and fantasy to explore the peculiarity of the human condition rendered into a coherent aesthetic clarity and style.

Shields’ work is a type of ‘dark romance’ that scales the bandwidth of image development in the age of Google Image searches, the Internet, and a near infinite source and access to moving-image making material and iconography. The challenge is finding the right nodes toward a product or project that captures the body from its most emaciated status of apathy to the near classical ideal forms that captivate and engage attention and interests of our collective gaze.

GIUSEPPE SPAGNULO
(Grottaglie, Italy 1936 – Grottaglie, Italy 2016)

Giuseppe Spagnulo (28 December 1936 – 15 June 2016) was an Italian sculptor.

Spagnulo was born in Grottaglie, Taranto. At young age he learned to work on the lathe in his father's ceramic worshop. Between 1952 and 1958 he studied at the Faenza Art Institute for Ceramics and then he moved to Milan, where he enrolled at the Brera Academy and worked as an assistant for Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana.

In the late 1960s, Spagnulo started working on his first sculptures, including the corten steel installation "Black Panther" (1968-1969), which was exhibited at the 1972 Venice Biennale. In 1976 he was at the Venice Biennale again, this time with a solo presentation, and in 1977 he was invited to Documenta in Kassel.

Spagnulo's sculptural style is characterized by the massive dimensions of his sculptures, often made of iron and whose subjects are generally abstract and tend to conceptualism. In the 1990s he started focusing on other materials, such as terracotta and steel. Many of his work are on display in public places in cities such as Rome, Bochum, Venice and Milan.

A formally trained ceramicist, Giuseppe Spagnulo creates large-scale abstract sculpture that explores industrial processes, the relationship between form and material, and “the quantity of space that a form manages to set into movement,” as he once said. His sculptures reflect the experience of the foundry, the steel mill, and blast furnaces, literally bearing traces of the danger and vigorous labor that went into their production. Spagnulo has termed his practice an exploration of the “complex body”, a way of fragmenting the figure and emphasizing its materiality and temporal existence by way of the sustained interaction between various parts.

Giuseppe Spagnulo died in his native city, in Grottaglie, in 2016.

BEN VAUTIER
(*Napels, Italy 1935)

Benjamin Vautier was born on July 18 in 1935 in Naples, Italy and in 1949 he moved with his mother to

the South of France.
In 1958, Vautier left his job at a book store and opened a stationary and record store.

He ran Laboratory 32 (Le Magasin), from 1958 to 1973, creating a salon-like meeting place for people to discuss new ideas. During this time, Vautier met Yves Klein and John Cage and became involved in the early stages of the Fluxus art movement.

Ben Vautieris better known for his text-based paintings. Vautier today lives and works in Nice (France), where he ran a record shop called Magazin between 1958 and 1973. He discovered Yves Klein and the Nouveau Realisme in the 1950s, but he soon became interested in the French dada artist Marcel Duchamp, in the music of John Cage and in October 1962, he joined the group of Fluxus artistic movement.

In 1959, Vautier founded the journal Ben Dieu. In 1960, he had his first one-man show, Rien et tout in Laboratoire 32. He has long defended the rights of minorities in all countries, and he has been influenced by the theories of Francois Fontan about ethnism. In 1981 he coined the name of the French art movement of the 1980s Figuration Libre (free figuration). In his view art is a practice that unifies life, objects, and philosophy. “What is culture? Culture is a fairytale that we have created. It can be manipulative. The purpose of culture is to amuse poor people and rich people alike.”, he explained.

The following decades, the artist has continued to produce works about every day life, always supporting the minority rights in France.
He still lives and work in Nice, France. Today, Vautier’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, among others.