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21/11/2008

Pirro Cuniberti

Esso Gallery, New York

Jennifer Bacon and Filippo Fossati are pleased to announce the opening, November 22, 2008 of the first solo exhibition in the United States of work by the Italian artist Pirro Cuniberti.

Pier Achille (Pirro) Cuniberti, a prominent figure in postwar Italian art, was born in 1923, Padulle di Sala Bolognese, near Bologna in Italy. After high school, in February 1943 Pirro Cuniberti received his draft notice and was sent to the 2nd Grenadier Regiment of Sardinia; fate will also intervene in the tragic days defending Rome. On the evening of September 10th, the military stronghold where Cuniberti was a telephone operator is attacked and his soldiers were killed, captured or scattered. He reached Bologna five days later. In February of 1944 he was called for service again and assigned to train in the Black Forest in Germany where he happens upon a print reproduction of "a small room with a bed, a small table and two straw chairs." He will later comment, "I was struck by the simplicity of that 'sketched painting'. I often went back to look at that print which had these words written on it: Vincent Van Gogh, Chambre d'Arles, 1889." At the end of the war, research into the "unknown" Van Gogh lead him to the extraordinary world of modern art.

In 1945 he was accepted in Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. A student of Giorgio Morandi and Giovanni Romagnoli, he graduated in 1948, the same year of the first post-war Venice Biennale, where he finally saw Van Gogh's Chambre d'Arles and discoveres Paul Klee, who became, from that moment on, the reference for his concept of form as infinite creative genesis. Having also met Mark Rothko, Max Ernst and Henry Moore in this period, he started to make many drawings, pastels, tempera on paper and small oil canvases. During this period he earned his living with the Mingozzi advertising studio and with the publicity department of Ducati (motorbike, radio and photography) and with Dino Gavina on graphic design and displays for trade fairs. He designed and produced chairs, lamps, objects and decorative plates in enameled iron. In 1952 he started making drawings with ballpoint pen on typing paper, careful studies of animals and insects which exaggerated forms, to achieve abstraction. In March 1953 he became Professor in the Drawing department of the Bologna Art School, which he left in 1978 embittered by the state of chaos prevailing in Italian schools. In 1955 he married Lalla in and in December of 1956, presented by Francesco Arcangeli, he inaugurated his first solo exhibition at Circolo di Cultura in Bologna. From then on his work has been showed all over Italy, with a few appearances outside. Like his mentor, Giorgio Morandi, he never left Bologna.

Cuniberti's work, bred on a sensible, constant diet of drawing, favores small-scale works and is divided into consecutive painterly periods that culminate with his very personal works started in 1979 on masonite panels, which are rendered in acrylic over a brushed acrylic base, initially accompanied by pastels and graphite.

To celebrate his 85 birthday this show brings together for the first time in the United States, a selection of his latest works from the year 2000 through the present.

In the two back rooms a small addition to Cuniberti's exhibition featuring works by artists who were friends or influenced his work such as Giorgio Morandi, Fausto Melotti, Saul Steinberg, Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux, Piero Manai, and Carol Rama.

A catalogue will be published for the show.

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 22, 6 p.m. - 8 p.m.

Esso Gallery
531 West 26th Street - New York
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am - 6 pm
Free admission

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