Farewell to Baruchello, artist of “tiny drawings” – Icona News

ROME, JAN 14 – Farewell to the artist of the “tiny drawings”. The painter Gianfranco Baruchello, an exponent of the art defined as ‘extra-medial’, died in Rome at the age of 98. Great protagonist of the Italian art scene starting from the sixties and master of our times, Baruchello was born in Livorno on August 24, 1924. Paris will give the turning point, thanks to meetings with the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, with the poet and critic of French art Alain Jouffroy, with the American composer John Cage and, above all, with Marcel Duchamp who greatly influenced Baruchello’s production. The Italian artist will move embracing more forms of expression and entering the field of extra-media art, as defined by the art historian Enrico Crispolti. He manages to blend together, in an eclectic and atypical way, multidisciplinary tools and references: not only painting, installation, assemblage, moving image, photography, sound, publishing but also economics, anthropology, agriculture, aesthetics. The beginnings date back to 1962 with the participation in the ‘New Realists’ exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, together with Enrico Baj, Tano Festa, Mimmo Rotella and Mario Schifano. In 1963 he was given a personal exhibition at La Tartaruga in Rome. In 2011 the National Gallery of Modern Art (Gnam) in Rome dedicated an anthological exhibition to him entitled ‘Gianfranco Baruchello. Certain ideas’ curated by Achille Bonito Oliva followed by others in Karlsruhe, Germany and in 2018 the retrospective ‘Gianfranco Baruchello’, curated by Gianfranco Maraniello at the Mart in Rovereto. His works are part of the collections of the most important museums, not least the Maxxi in Rome which houses ‘Piccolo Sistema’, a sort of compendium of the artist’s poetics. Also famous is the project that Baruchello presented in 1989 at the Spoleto Festival, ‘Voices on the water’, a performance in which the artist takes care of a small Ginkgo Biloba bonsai. In 1998, at the behest of him and his wife, Carla Subrizi, professor of contemporary art at the Sapienza University of Rome, the Baruchello Foundation was born, with premises covering a thousand square meters on four floors in Via di Santa Cornelia in Rome, in the Parco di Veio. (HANDLE).
(ANSA)