Lino Bianchi Barriviera biography

Lino Bianchi Barriviera was an important Italian painter, draftsman, and engraver of the 20th-century scene, appreciated and admired worldwide and placed by international critics among the best masters in the use of etching, a characteristic technique of his works.
Born in Montebelluna in the province of Treviso in 1906, he was directed towards technical studies by his family, while simultaneously nurturing his passion for art, which led him to start engraving at a very young age and to participate in numerous group exhibitions that earned him respect and admiration from the art world.
In the mid-1920s, Lino Bianchi Barriviera created his first engraving in Florence, at the studio of Raoul Dal Molin Ferenzona, which he frequented assiduously, while at the end of the 1920s he organized his first exhibitions, coinciding with the years of fascism.
In 1927, he embarked on his first trip to Libya, commissioned by the Italian government, which sent him to the African territory to study the architecture of the monuments and analyze the local culture. Upon returning to Italy, he moved to Venice, where he attended the Accademia delle Belle Arti as a guest, and then settled in Rome with his family in 1934. From there, he began his academic career, being appointed as a lecturer at the Scuola delle Belle Arti di Napoli, where he took the chair of engraving.
The world of engravings is undoubtedly what most characterized the artistic life of Lino Bianchi Barriviera. Consider that from his second trip to Libya, which took place in 1937, a work of thirteen engravings emerged, and a few years later, during a mission in Ethiopia, where he assisted the studies of the archaeologist Monti Della Corte, he developed a complete cycle of engravings dedicated to the reliefs of the twelve churches of Lalibela. His complete collection of engravings boasts more than 950 plates, for which the painter predominantly used the etching technique. It must be said that the artist greatly loved depicting in his works the places he visited or lived in. In fact, many of his engravings are dedicated to the places of his childhood in Veneto, but also to the destinations of his travels and the cities where he later lived.
In the 1930s, Lino Bianchi Barriviera participated in several international exhibitions, such as those in Munich in 1934, Budapest in '36, and Paris in '37. During these same years, he won numerous awards and tributes and initiated a series of solo exhibitions in Italy, such as those in Rome, Trieste, and Turin. In the 1940s, he joined the group of "Pittori di Guerra" and in 1956 obtained the chair of engraving at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Roma, where he would continue to teach until 1976. In the last years of his life, the great "master of engravings" dedicated himself to writing a manual to pass on his artistic techniques, titled "L'incisione e la stampa originale" published by the Neri Pozza publishing house in 1984.
Lino Bianchi Barriviera dies in Acilia in 1985, but his works will always keep alive the memory of his great artistic talent in engraving and in various other forms of art such as oil painting, decorations, frescoes, woodwork, glass and ceramic work, and even jewelry creation.