Leoncillo
24.09.2022 — 19.11.2022
Show introduction
The last decade of Leoncillo’s activity is not only characterized by his best-known corpus of sculptures, but also by a large number of works on paper that are distinguished from those previously performed not only in terms of language, now aniconic. They are, in fact, “mixed techniques” characterized by encrustations of enamels, cuts made on layers, overlapping of sheets of different consistency, lumps of matter no less mastered than in sculptures. The subjects are the same as those of the contemporary sculptures. Leoncillo was always a designer of great quality and constant commitment, but in these works he operated a linguistic short circuit, where the graphic aspect was transformed into sculptural modeling and vice versa.
Artist
Leoncillo Leonardi, born in Spoleto in 1915, is one of the most important European sculptors of the post-war period. He had the great merit of revitalizing such an ancient Italian artisanal tradition as that of ceramics. He won the gold medal for applied art at the7th Milan Triennial in 1940 with his first ceramics fired in Umbrian kilns. He soon began to take part in the Roman art scene where he became friends with Ettore Colla, Renato Guttuso, Toti Scialoja and Giulio Turcato. In 1946 he was among those who signed the “Nuova Secessione Artistica Italiana” manifesto and later took part in the first show of the “Fronte nuovo delle arti” movement which, immediately after the war, was internationally considered to be the real representative Italian avant-garde. In 1954 he is at the Venice Biennale, where he returned to exhibit in 1948, 1950, 1952, 1960 and 1968; he was asked to exhibit in a single room together with Lucio Fontana and here he revealed his close relationship to the abstract art Fontana was developing during that period.
