Mattia Moreni

Mattia Moreni (Pavia, 1920 - Brisighella, 1999) is an Italian sculptor and painter who went through the most important phases of the art history of the late twentieth century. After the beginnings of a purely figurative Fauvist-expressionist matrix, he approaches post-cubist solutions by reworking Picasso and Léger, to then propose abstract-concrete forms in conjunction with his adhesion to the Group of Eight. Gruppo degli Otto was founded in 1952 by Lionello Venturi, and the participants besides Moreni are Afro, Renato Birolli, Antonio Corpora, Giuseppe Santomaso, Ennio Morlotti, Giulio Turcato, and Emilio Vedova; these artists gathered are totally open to the innovations that circulate at European level, leaving the figurative to embrace an abstract poetics and are among the first to perceive the novelties of informal themes. Moreni later approaches the Informal (of a naturalistic type theorized by Francesco Arcangeli) and Neo-Expressionism.

From 1948 to 1960 he participated seamlessly in the Venice Biennials, in 1956 with a personal room; in 1954 he was awarded by Francesco Arcangeli with the Spoleto Prize. Thanks to the support of Michel Tapié, in 1956 he moved to Paris, where he deepened his research for a decade.

In 1947 and 1949 two personal exhibitions were organized at the Galleria del Milione in Milan and the first anthologies arrived in 1963, at the Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen and at the Civic Museum in Bologna, and in 1964, at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. After the informal experience he returns to insert object references in his works, the cycle of Watermelons belongs to 1964: between Eros and Thanatos, Moreni investigates the decadence of contemporary society. Decay, death and splendor become the themes of his work by him, in a tangle that is difficult to separate and with tones that are never sad or afflicted by disheartening victimhood and, indeed, endowed with highly vitalistic charges. After the anthropoid watermelons, the decadence of the human species is captured by the artist with other images: now sterile female macro sexes and sets of symbols, including the humanoid-computer combination and the human-humanoid-computer combination.

In recent decades, Moreni's work has largely taken place in Romagna: in particular in Santa Sofia, where he paints five large self-portraits and the monumental sculptural work La mixture (1976-1984) and where he participates in several editions of the exhibition of contemporary art Campigna Award.

Moreni has exhibited in Italy and abroad organizing important personal exhibitions. Renato Barilli, Enrico Crispolti, Claudio Spadoni were interested in his work. His works now enrich the collections of Italian and international museums, including: the GNAM - National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Mart - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trento and Rovereto, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the Museo de Arte in Sao Paulo in Brazil and the Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museum in Berlin.