Marco Gastini biography

Marco Gastini was an Italian artist born in Turin in 1938. He trained at the School of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts of Turin where he graduated in 1960, and in the same year, he won the Young Artists Award of the City of Turin with the painting Breakfast on the Beach.
In 1964, he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Il Falò di Alba. Two years later, he began teaching at the Liceo Artistico, a position he would hold until 1985. In 1967-68, he created his first spray paintings, which he exhibited in 1968 at the Galleria Il Punto di Torino. The following year, he participated in the Salone dell'Annunciata in Milan with paintings on plexiglass. Also from those years are the first lead and antimony castings on the wall presented at the group exhibition Arte e Critica '70, held at the Galleria Civica di Modena.
In 1975, he held a solo exhibition at the Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles, during which he presented the artwork Muro, while in 1977 and 1979 he exhibited at the John Weber Gallery in New York.
In his works, themes such as space, energy, tension, involvement, degree of immersion, attraction, and repulsion are always present. In these years, the use of color also appears alongside the most different materials: from wood to stones, from parchment to iron.
The intense exhibition activity and collaboration with Italian, European, and American galleries continues. In 2001, his city, Turin, dedicated a major retrospective to him curated by Pier Giovanni Castagnoli and Helmut Friedel at the Galleria D’Arte Moderna in the Promotrice spaces, and subsequently in Munich, at the Lenbachhaus in the Kunstbau space. Long ill, Marco Gastini passed away in Turin in 2018.