"Untitled"

GIUSEPPE SANTOMASO

He was born in Venice in 1907. The son of a goldsmith, he began his artistic training first at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, then at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts (where he would teach for twenty years from 1954 to '74), forging a solidarity with sculptor Alberto Viani. His style is, in the early days, naturalistic and figurative: at the 19th Venice Biennale in 1934 he participated with the work Figure (he would be present in thirteen other editions, interspersed with Documenta Kassel). In 1939 he traveled to Paris for his first solo exhibition at Galerie Rive Gauche. In 1943 he exhibited at the Quadriennale in Rome, and in 1945 he made illustrations for Paul Eluard's book Grand Air. In 1946 he participated, in Venice, in the founding of the group of antifascist artists Nuova secessione artistica italiana - Fronte nuovo delle arti. He exhibited in Stockholm in 1948 together with Afro and Birolli. After an initial figurative period, Santomaso devoted himself to the creation of a series of works where the influence of post-cubist research is strong, then in the mid-1950s he moved on to informal abstractionism (Dalla parte della Meridiana, 1956, Neri e rossi del canale, 1958). While continuing to meditate on the Venetian colorist tradition-which he “forces” in the direction of Van Gogh's expressionism after his trip to Holland and Cubism, in the wake of Braque seen in Paris-in his orientation toward chromatic transfigurations of light much must have influenced the refractions on precious stones observed at his father's workshop. By now fully included in the Informal movement, he received many awards, exhibited in Milan, Venice, the United States, and in 1961 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam organized a solo show. In the same year, he participated in the São Paulo Biennale. Unlike almost all informal abstractionism, Santomaso maintains the idea of compositional harmony (Venetian Red, 1959). In 1965-66 a retrospective of his work is presented first at the Kunstverein in Hamburg and then at the Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin and the Museum am Ostwall in Dortmund. In the meantime he continued his activity in the field of graphic art and produced some lithographs for Ezra Pound's book of poems An Angle (1971). “The etching exercise helped me a lot in purifying, in making my discourse more essential. For example, having to use for aquatint the boîte à grains technique, which consists of dropping a thin shower of resin on the plates to be etched, I ended up creating a similar technique for painting as well,” says the artist. In the 1980s and 1990s, exhibitions abroad intensified (Barcelona, Munich, Amsterdam New York). He died in Venice in 1990. In 2008, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, the Cini Foundation in Venice organized an extensive anthological exhibition. The Piero della Francesca Art Gallery has long collaborated with the artist by organizing a solo exhibition of his work in 1976.