Gianfranco Ferroni

Gianfranco Ferroni (Livorno, 1927 - Bergamo, 2001)

During the War he moved to Tradate near Varese, where, in the first post-war period, Ferroni lived a troubled period of great solitude that later also marked its production in the early 1960s.

In 1946, despite the opposition of the parents, he began attending the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where he had the opportunity to meet the art critic Franco Passoni and artists such as Dova, Crippa and Meloni. In Milan Ferroni begins to attend a group of young authors who will be the spokespersons of the movement of existential realism for a few years. After the solo show held at the Schettini Gallery in Milan, Bergamini Gallery represented his work between 1956 and 1960.

The first etching, Periferia, of which there is only one example, dates back to 1957; it is concentrated on the suburbs of Milan. From this moment on, throughout his life, the chalcographic activity will become fundamental in his experience. In 1958. he participated in the Venice Biennale. That year was for him a year of reflection about the fate of his work. After the last exhibition at the Bergamini Gallery, in 1960 and his presence at the Tokyo Biennale in 1964 and at the 1965 Rome Quadriennale, Ferroni returned to exhibit at the 1968 Venice Biennale where he was assigned a personal room. Once the space has been set up, however, he decides - adhering to the youth riots and protests - to exhibit the paintings facing the wall.

From 1968 to 1972 Ferroni lived in Viareggio, in an isolation that heralds another change in his poetics and a new stage of his painting, increasingly focused on the physical and psychological interior of the studio. After 1975 there are some important exhibition events in Ferroni's career, that presents his works in Italy and abroad, garnering great interest from critics and the public. The beginnings of the Eighties are immediately marked, in 1980, by a great anthology in Naples that traces his entire activity from 1958.

In the Nineties, every labor suddenly seems to calm down; the objects, constantly protagonists, now float in an aura of magic and suspension. In 2002, a year after his death, the catalog raisonné of the engraved works was published and in 2006, the catalog raisonné of lithographs. In 2007, two anthological exhibitions were inaugurated at Palazzo Reale in Milan and at Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo.