DE GREGORIO Giuseppe

The painting of Giuseppe De Gregorio grew out of an ongoing engagement with nature, but rarely limited itself to depicting it. Rocks, roots, marine organisms, insects and plant forms become, in his artworks, presences transformed by color and material, until they lie on the boundary between recognizability and invention. A leading member of the Spoleto Group, the artist moved through Post-Cubism and Art Informel, later developing a personal language in which the natural world seems to emerge from within the painted surface itself.

Origins and Early Recognition

De Gregorio was born in Spoleto on August 11, 1920, into a family with ties to painting: his father was a painter, and his paternal grandfather had taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania. However, his training developed primarily through a personal journey, shaped by the cultural milieu of Umbria. In the late 1940s, he began taking part in group exhibitions, and in 1948 he received the Orvieto City Prize, one of the first public recognitions of his work.

The initial artworks show an interest in Post-Cubism, evident in the geometric simplification of figures and landscapes and in the tendency to organize space through areas of color and divisions. The subject remains present, but its structure is progressively reworked: simply rendering its outward appearance is no longer enough, as the artist’s attention shifts to the relationships between forms and the autonomous possibilities of composition.

The Spoleto Group and the Renewal of Painting

In the early 1950s, De Gregorio helped form the Spoleto Group, also known as the Group of Six, together with Filippo Marignoli, Giannetto Orsini, Ugo Rambaldi, Piero Raspi and Bruno Toscano. Sources date the group’s formation to between 1953 and 1954, a period when many Italian artists were searching for new directions after the war. Although they maintained distinct styles and personalities, the members shared a desire to move beyond figurative conventions and engage with explorations in abstraction and Art Informel.

LThe experience had significance beyond the collaboration among six painters: it helped bring Spoleto into the national art debate, demonstrating that the renewal of Italian art was not limited to major centers. For De Gregorio, it also provided the context in which he moved from post-Cubist structures to a freer style of painting, concerned with material, gesture and the internal tensions of color.

LThe Informal and the Relationship with Nature

Over the course of the 1950s, the forms in his painting gradually lost the geometric rigidity of his early work. Color fields began to overlap, brushwork gained energy and the surface became a field of dynamic relationships. A painting such as Painting (1957) documents this transformation, in which color no longer merely fills in outlines, but plays a direct part in constructing the image.

His work is also associated with late naturalism, a critical orientation linked in particular to Francesco Arcangeli. From this perspective, nature is not understood as a repertoire of forms to be faithfully reproduced, but as a vital reality made up of transformations, layers and movements. Rocks, water and vegetation can be evoked without becoming immediately recognizable subjects: rather, the painterly material conveys their energy and complexity. LAbstraction, then, does not imply a separation from the natural world, but a different way of relating to it.

The 1960s and Critical Recognition

Paintings such as Interior (1960–1961), Lights and Stones (1961) and Barbaric Rite (1963–1964) testify to the development of a style in which gesture, layers and color contrasts play an increasingly important role. The composition is structured through tensions and accumulations, allowing references to the natural world to emerge without reducing them to traditional depictions.

During these years, De Gregorio also consolidated his exhibition presence. After the exhibition at the Galleria Spotorno in Milan in 1959, he held a solo exhibition at the Galleria Il Quadrante in Florence in 1962 and one at the Galleria Il Milione in Milan in 1963. In 1964, he took part in the 32nd Venice Biennale, while his work attracted the attention of critics such as Francesco Arcangeli, Maurizio Calvesi, Enrico Crispolti and Giovanni Carandente. These events marked the emergence of an artistic practice that began in Umbria but was now part of the national debate on contemporary painting.

Fossils, Organisms and Microcosms

From the second half of the 1960s, forms more clearly associated with the organic world began to emerge in De Gregorio’s artworks. This was not simply a return to figuration: fossils, roots, and sea creatures seem to arise from the very material of the painting, as if the color held traces of natural processes. Works such as Fossil (1969), Old Roots and Shoots (1969–1970), Sea Creature (1970), and Seafood (1970) demonstrate this particular ability to evoke organisms and living structures without relinquishing the compositional freedom achieved with Art Informel.

In the 1970s, his interest increasingly turned to natural microcosms, observed as if through a fantastical magnifying glass. In Seabed, Woods, Butterfly Collection, and Insect and Flower, artworks documented in 1974, color helps suggest vitality, movement, and depth. The landscape is no longer merely an external space, but a universe of minute presences, sometimes imaginary, in which observation and invention become inseparable.

Works on Paper and His Ties to Spoleto

Alongside paintings, his documented output includes drawings and works on paper, also attested by materials held at the Perugia State Archive, Spoleto Section. It is important to distinguish these artworks from printed graphic works: without information about the individual piece, it is not correct to automatically identify a work on paper as a lithograph or etching. Knowledge of the technique remains essential to accurately describe the artist’s output.

His relationship with Spoleto remained a constant throughout his life. Although he moved to Florence in 1974, De Gregorio continued to maintain ties with his hometown and, in 1978, at the invitation of Giancarlo Menotti, created the poster for the 21st Festival of the Two Worlds. In 1997 he returned to live in Spoleto, where he died on December 31, 2007. His personal archive, containing correspondence and career-related documents, is held in the Spoleto section of the Perugia State Archive.

His art tells the story of a journey in which post-Cubism, Art Informel, and organic imagery are not isolated chapters, but moments in a single ongoing quest. Nature remains the profound point of reference for a painting that, through color and material, seeks to convey not only its visible appearance, but also its processes of transformation and vital force.