Luca Alinari biography

Luca Alinari was an Italian painter and a set designer and one of the major exponents of Tuscan Imaginative Surrealism. Luca Alinari was born in Florence in 1943. He later settled in Rignano sull'Arno where he lived and worked throughout his life. Like all children he loves to draw and paint, but this passion will become his work and his main way of expressing himself. At twenty he attended the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Florence. During this period he became passionate about literary criticism and subsequently worked as a reviewer of fiction texts in the sector of written and television communication. In 1979, Luca Alinari decided to found the art magazine "Signorina Rosina" , of which he would be editor and director. In the same period he was very active in the intellectual and artistic world. Starting from the seventies he began to establish himself as a painter. He begins a study on the free combination of objects and figures in fantastic atmospheres. His initial stylistic references are in fact linked to Pop Art and above all to Neodada . He experiments with different techniques, such as the use of collage, decalcomania, fluorescent colors and photographic transpositions.
Luca Alinari was a friend of some important writers, such as Domenico Rea, Alfonso Gatto, José Saramago (who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998), Edoardo Sanguineti (who dedicated some poems to him in 1974), and Goffredo Parise, who wrote an essay on his painting in the 80s.In 1990 he painted the drape of the Palio di Siena, the so-called Cencio.
Luca Alinari reached full artistic maturity around 1993. In his works he prefers fantastic landscapes characterized by a lively and brilliant colour. He uses an original pictorial technique that combines material layers and refined backgrounds of smooth and transparent colour. In 2011 he organized an exhibition entitled Gelo , in Città di Castello. He is interviewed by Italian Art Magazine , and declares that the name was inspired by a quote by the writer Franz Kafka. Luca Alinari attributes the task of the thaw to his latest works, which are colored bright red. In the same year he created the logo for the Cycling World Championships of 2013, which made some stops in Tuscany . The logo contains the essential lines of a bicycle, with the frame representing a hill, a Renaissance profile, a hint of a typical Italian landscape characterized by cypresses, but also the rationality of the line and the new humanistic perspective.
Over the years it wins several important awards: on 12 June 2014 he was awarded at the Spoleto Festival Art; on 28 September 2014 he received the Premio Nazionale Torre di Castruccio with Giorgetto Giugiaro and other important personalities of culture and medicine, on 10 June 2015 he won the Premio Filo d'argento Auser at Palazzo Vecchio > for painting and the medal Florentia Mater.
In 2018 he received the highest recognition of the Tuscany Region, the Silver Banner.
During his life, Luca Alinari organizes exhibitions in important venues, such as in the Palazzo Lanfranchi in Matera, in Ljubljana, in the Galleria Fogola in Turin, in the Palazzo Reale in Milan, at the Masaccio's House in the Valdarno, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Villa Croce in Genoa, at the Tour Fromage in Aosta and in the Galleria Il Bisonte in Florence.
Luca Alinari dies in Florence in 2019.