Pericle Fazzini biography

- PERICLE FAZZINI PAINTER

 

Pericle Fazzini was an Italian sculptor and painter. He was born in Grottammare in 1913.

He approaches sculpture in his father's carving workshop and, on the advice of the poet Mario Rivosecchi, is sent to Rome in 1930 to study at the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Accademia di Belle Arti.

In 1931, he won the competition for the funeral monument of Cardinal Dusmet in Catania. The following year, he participated in the competition for the National Artistic Pension, obtaining a scholarship with which he maintained a studio in Rome for the next three years.

In 1935, Pericle Fazzini participated in the II Quadriennale di Roma, winning an award for the high reliefs Danza and Tempesta. In 1938, he opened his own studio on Via Margutta, where he would remain for his entire life, and joined the artistic movement Corrente, which gathered around the Milanese art magazine of the same name. In the same year, he participated in the XXI Biennale di Venezia with a group of sculptures that established him at the highest levels of European sculpture: the portrait of Ungaretti, Momenti di solitudine, Ragazzo che ascolta, and Giovane che declama.

In 1947, he won the Premio Torino with the opera Anita in piedi and participated in the exhibition of the Fronte Nuovo per le Arti, with Emilio Vedova and Renato Guttuso. In 1949, he won the Premio Saint Vincent with the opera Sibilla and participated in the exhibition Twentieth-Century Italian Art at MoMA in New York. In 1951, he held his first retrospective at the Fondazione Premi Roma. In 1954, he returned to the Venice Biennale, winning the first prize for sculpture.

In 1955, Pericle Fazzini began teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, while from 1958 to 1980 he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.  

Between the late fifties and the sixties, he worked on monumental projects including the portal of the Church of San Giovanni Battista on the A1, the Fountain for the ENI Palace in Rome, and the Monument for the Resistance in Ancona.

In 1970, the Resurrection for the Nervi Hall in the Vatican began, which would only be exhibited in 1977 and can be considered his most famous artwork.

The final years of his prestigious career saw the organization of two important anthological exhibitions in 1983 in Avezzano and the following year at the Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna e contemporanea in Rome.

Pericle Fazzini died in Rome in 1987.