Remo Brindisi biography

Remo Brindisi was an Italian painter. Born in Rome in April 1918. The eighth of eleven children, from the first year of his life he moved with the whole family to Abruzzo and attended the School of Art in Penne, a small town in the province of Pescara, thus starting to follow his passion for art. In the following years he moved to Rome, to his hometown, where he attended the Experimental Center of Scenography and lessons at the Free School of the Nude of the Academy of Fine Arts. He later won a scholarship which led him to enroll at the Higher Institute of Art for Book Illustration
His studies were interrupted by the call to arms caused by the outbreak of the second war worldwide, an experience that will take him to Florence at the Military Geographical Institute. It was precisely in Florence that he lived after the armistice of 1943, enjoying a carefree break in his life also thanks to his association 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 presented his first solo exhibition in the Tuscan city in which he exhibited works of a descriptive and lyrical nature, also exhibiting the catalog created for the occasion by Eugenio Montale
In 1944 the painter was imprisoned by the Germans, however, managed to escape and take refuge in Venice until the liberation took place. In Venice he met the art dealer Carlo Cardazzo, defined by many as the discoverer of the greatest talents of post-war Italian painting, who offered him an intense exhibition of his works at the Galleria Il Cavallino . Among the painter's favorite themes in recent years we have the human figure, the shepherd children, the Venetian and Abruzzo landscapes wrapped in a dreamy and relaxed atmosphere. Linked in his early works to a descriptive and realistic structure, he subsequently matured his style by adding expressionist nuances.
In the fifties and sixties he participated in all the Venice Biennials and the Quadrennials of Rome, proving to be a great painter inspired by political and social commitment and focusing his you work on the references of expressionism with clear informal intentions. In fact, Remo Brindisi focuses on works that favor the emotional aspect of reality rather than that which can be objectively perceived and uses expressionist characteristics in the context of 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 Milanese cultural climate of those years was turbulent and, in the controversy between abstractionists and realists, Brindisi took sides by joining the Gruppo Linea, founded in the same year together with the painters Giovanni Dova and Ibrahim Kudra, which marks a first break with neo-cubism. In 1950 the group dissolved and the painter approached the Realism movement.
In 1955 Remo Brindisi made a new change of artistic direction due to a heated controversy on Realism with the painter Renato Guttuso, on the occasion of an anthological exhibition that the municipality of Milan set up in his honor at Art Pavilion, which marks the break from the movement.
Between 1956 and 1961 was the start of historical cycles based on civil commitment, composed of large canvases characterized by cyclical themes, in which the painter witnessed great collective suffering, the representation of which gives an epic character to the works. His poetics, the lyrical transfiguration of reality, the reading of humanity in sentiment and in the existential condition, characterize his path, always capable of igniting evocations in the soft melody or with dazzling shock waves. He painted 14 canvases of Via Crucis (1956-1957) in a moment of strong interior religiosity in the climate of terror that had characterized the post-war period, the Overthrow 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 Remo Brindisi's stylistic change in those years and the salient characteristics of his new figurative research. The impetus of strong tensions and lyricism of memory continue to characterize him.
In 1970 he created the Alternative Museum of Remo Brindisi in Lido di Spina to which he donated a copious collection of twentieth century artists, demonstrating that in him the identification of art with social activities was a precise civil duty and a precise human belief. The museum is housed inside the house-museum built by the Milanese architect Nanda Vigo, which has now become the property of the municipality of Comacchio following the artist's will.
In the same period he was awarded the special "Federico Bernagozzi" prize, on the occasion of which he created ten portraits of illustrious Ferrarese, visible at the Teatro Sociale della Concordia in Portomaggiore. These years are characterized by the painter's production which determines his search for the dynamism of the figures and the use of bright colours; 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 Venice Biennale and for a long time held the position of director and teacher of the Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata, receiving the Gold Medal of Public Education for cultural merit. 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.