The Cat, 1974

Gianpaolo Berto  

The cat is an etching on paper made by Gian Paolo Berto. Edition 40 of numbered prints. The artwork represents a cat through a perfect hatching. The artwork is masterfully represented through confident strokes, with a beautiful full moon above the cat's head that makes it unique. 

Gian Paolo Berto was born and raised in the limited but fervent artistic environment of post-war Adria where, in addition to the isolated and not yet rediscovered genius of the Anglo-Saxon Foster, a new cultural climate was forming alongside the figures of Scarpari, Reali, Rizzi, Palmieri, Gioli. Then in Rovigo, he studied with Prudenziato and Breseghello and in friendship with Gabbris Ferrari. The meeting with the masters Zancanaro and Levi was dazzling and constituted the springboard for this eclectic artist in the world of contemporary Italian painting. : Despite being among the very few admitted to De Chirico's studio (but also to Guttuso and Picasso) and having exhibited in prestigious galleries and museums, Berto has always exempted himself from appearing in the windows of the great art market, preferring contact, in an anti-elitist way, with the most genuine public: students, ordinary people, artists and intellectuals who conduct their research with rigor and autonomy from fashions and trends. This does not mean that his painting is detached from the context of contemporary art. On the contrary, the painter's characteristic appropriation of the reality that surrounds him and of the evolving forms of painting in Berto is explicit and, as often happens in art, prophetic. The debt contracted by American Pop towards the European one is well known: a front that at the time found an attentive and operational Berto and then, in the following decades, ready to seize the blossoming of the successive frontiers of art. (Artist's website).