exhibition
From April 20, 2023 to June 17, 2023
My ambition is to help people see what their eyes don’t: the perspective of the space in which their opinions and actions originate.
Giuseppe Capogrossi was born in Rome on the 7 March 1900.
He graduated with a degree in Law but devoted his entire life to painting. In 1923, he attended Felice Carena’s Free School of Nude, one of the most accredited in Rome. Between 1927 and 1933, he spent repeated periods of time in Paris, where he developed a figurative and tonal painting style that drew on classical Italian influences. He exhibited for the first time in 1927 in a collective exhibition at the Pensione Dinesen in Rome, with Cavalli and Di Cocco. Once again with Cavalli, along with Cagli and Sclavi, in 1933, he took part in the exhibition at the Bonjean Gallery in Paris, presented by the well-known critic Waldemar George who first referred to this group as the “Ecole de Rome”. From then on, he participated in numerous exhibitions in private galleries and public spaces.
In the aftermath of WW2, Capogrossi, like many other European artists, embarked upon a profound rethinking of his creative research. He spent long periods in solitude and in 1948 presented the first results of his new journey at the 24 International Art Exhibition in Venice.
With the gradual abandonment of figuration, after a brief period of neo-cubist experiences (1947-1949), he arrived at a rigorous and personal abstractionism characterised by a unique form-sign which, combined in infinite variations, arrived at the point in which it constructed the space of the painting, a symbolic representation of an inner spatial organisation. In January 1950, the exhibition, inaugurated at the Galleria del Secolo in Rome, exploded onto the art scene as an emblematic event. The works were later presented at Galleria Il Milione in Milan and Galleria del Cavallino in Venice, creating a “Capogrossi case” among the critics.
In 1951, Capogrossi took part in the foundation of the Origine group, with Mario Ballocco, Alberto Burri and Ettore Colla, and achieved international fame by participating in March 1951 in Paris – as the only Italian – in the Véhémences Confrontées exhibition.
From Italy, Capogrossi’s toothed sign, the mysterious alphabet of an unknown language, landed with its trail of critical debate on the European and American art scene, attracting the attention of international critics. “The individual signs refer, especially when arranged in series, to alphabets of languages that we are unable to interpret, even when the order and sequence appear so strong as to evoke the presence of meaning”. (Roland Penrose, 1957). The sequential progression of the signs evokes that of writing or musical scores, colour intervenes initially as an element of pause as in Superficie 127 (1955), and then conquers a large part of the pictorial space and interacts on the same plane as the sign continuum.
In 1940, he became professor of “Figure Drawing” at the Liceo Artistico in Rome holding the post until 1966, when he was called to the chair of ‘Decoration’ at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples until 1970. During his long artistic career, he received numerous awards and acknowledgements: in 1962, with a personal room at the 31st Venice Biennale, he was awarded the prize for painting, joint winner along with Morlotti; in 1971, the “Vent’anni di Biennale” prize at the São Paulo Biennale and the Prix d’honneur at the International Engraving Exhibition in Ljubljana. In the same year, the Ministry of Education awarded him the gold medal for cultural merit.
Capogrossi’s works are part of the most important public collections in Europe and around the world: the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome; the Uffizi in Florence; the GAM in Turin; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; Moma in New York; the Guggenheim Foundation, to name but a few.
Giuseppe Capogrossi died in Rome on the 9 October 1972.
Sources:
Giulio Carlo Argani, Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Capogrossi, Rome 1967
Capogrossi, una restrospettiva, catalogue of the exhibition curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 2012 -13
https://www.fondazionearchiviocapogrossi.it/
Superficie CP753, 1952-1953