Remo Brindisi biography

Remo Brindisi was an Italian painter. He was born in Rome in April 1918. The eighth of eleven children, from his first year of life he moved with his entire family to Abruzzo and attended the Art School in Penne, a small town in the province of Pescara, thus beginning to pursue his passion for art. In the following years, he moved to Rome, his birthplace, where he attended the Experimental Center of Scenography and classes at the Free School of the Nude of the Academy of Fine Arts. He later won a scholarship that led him to enroll at the Higher Institute of Art for Book Illustration.
His studies are interrupted by the call to arms caused by the outbreak of the Second World War, an experience that will take him to Florence at the Istituto Geografico Militare. It is precisely in Florence that he lives after the armistice of 1943, enjoying a carefree break in his life also thanks to the camaraderie with artists and friends including the self-taught painter Ardengo Soffici, the famous painter and engraver Ottone Rosai and the founder of the Roman school Felice Carena. In 1940 Remo Brindisi presents his first solo exhibition in the Tuscan city, showcasing works of descriptive and lyrical style, also exhibiting the catalog created for the occasion by Eugenio Montale.
In 1944, the painter was imprisoned by the Germans but managed to escape and take refuge in Venice until the liberation. In Venice, he met the art dealer Carlo Cardazzo, described by many as the discoverer of the greatest talents in post-war Italian painting, who offered him an extensive exhibition of his works at the Galleria Il Cavallino. Among the painter's favorite themes during these years were the human figure, the shepherds, and the Venetian and Abruzzese landscapes enveloped in a dreamy and relaxed atmosphere. Initially tied to a descriptive and realistic approach in his early works, he later developed his style by adding expressionist nuances.
In the fifties and sixties, he participated in all the Venice Biennales and the Rome Quadriennales, demonstrating himself to be a great painter inspired by political and social commitment, focusing his works on the calls of expressionism with clear informal intentions. Remo Brindisi indeed concentrates on works that prioritize the emotional aspect of reality rather than the objectively perceivable one, and he uses expressionist features within what he will define as New Figuration.
In 1947, the same Caldazzo invited him to Milan to exhibit in his new Galleria Il Naviglio. The cultural climate in Milan during those years was turbulent, and in the debate between abstractionists and realists, Brindisi aligned himself with the Gruppo Linea, founded in the same year together with painters Giovanni Dova and Ibrahim Kudra, marking a first break with neocubism. In 1950, the group disbanded and the painter approached the Realism movement.
In 1955, Remo Brindisi made a new artistic change of direction due to a heated debate on Realism with the painter Renato Guttuso, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition that the city of Milan organized in his honor at the Padiglione D'Arte, marking his break from the movement.
Between 1956 and 1961, the initiation of historical cycles focused on civic engagement took place, consisting of large canvases characterized by cyclical themes, in which the painter became a witness to a great collective suffering, whose representation gives the works an epic character. His poetics, the lyrical transfiguration of reality, the reading of humanity in sentiment and existential condition, characterize his journey, always capable of igniting evocations in the melody of the subtle or with dazzling shock waves. He painted 14 canvases of Via Crucis (1956-1957) during a time of strong inner religiosity in the climate of terror that had characterized the post-war period, the Demolition of the Myth of Stalin (1958), the Trial of Cardinal Mindszenty (1959), and the two versions of the History of Fascism (1960-1961) which, in particular, allow us to understand the stylistic change of Remo Brindisi during those years and the salient features of his new figurative research. The impetus of strong tensions and the lyricism of memory continue to characterize him still.
In 1970, he established the Museo Alternativo di Remo Brindisi in Lido di Spina, to which he donated a substantial collection of 20th-century artists, demonstrating that for him, the identification of art with social activities is a precise civic duty and a precise human belief. The museum is housed within the house-museum designed by the Milanese architect Nanda Vigo, now owned by the municipality of Comacchio according to the artist's testamentary wishes.
In the same period, he is awarded the special "Federico Bernagozzi" prize, on the occasion of which he creates ten portraits of illustrious people from Ferrara, visible at the Teatro Sociale della Concordia in Portomaggiore. These years are characterized by the painter's production that determines his search for the dynamism of figures and the use of bright colors; among these are the Tre Profili, Profili, Venezia, and another Venezia, all produced in the seventies and eighties.
In 1972, he was appointed president of the Biennale di Venezia and for a long time held the position of director and lecturer at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Macerata, receiving the Gold Medal for Public Education for cultural merits. His works are part of public and private collections in national and international museums.
Remo Brindisi passed away in Lido di Spina in 1996 and will be remembered as the epic singer of the historical myths of our time.