Marco Gastini biography

Marco Gastini was an Italian artist born in Turin in 1938. He trained at the Painting School of the Academy of Fine Arts of Turin where he graduated in 1960 and in the same year won the Young Artists Award of the City of Turin with the painting Breakfast on the Beach.
In 1964 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Il Falò di Alba. Two years later, he began teaching at the Art High School, a position he held until 1985. In 1967-68 he created the first spray paintings which he exhibited in 1968 at the Galleria Il Punto di Torino. The following year he participated in the Salone dell'Annunciata in Milan with paintings on plexiglass. Also from those years are the first lead and antimony wall castings presented at the group exhibition Arte e Critica ‘70, held at the Galleria Civica of Modena.
In 1975 he held a solo exhibition at the Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles, on which occasion he presented the artwork Wall, while in 1977 and 1979 he exhibited at the John Weber Gallery in New York.
Themes such as space, energy, tension, involvement, degree of immersion, attraction and repulsion are always present in his artworks. In these years, the use of color also appears alongside various materials: from wood to stones, from parchment to iron.
The exhibition activity and collaboration with Italian, European, and American galleries continues intensely. In 2001, his city, Turin, dedicated a major retrospective curated by Pier Giovanni Castagnoli and Helmut Friedel at the Galleria D’Arte Moderna in the Promotrice spaces, and later in Munich, at the Lenbachhaus in the Kunstbau space. Ill for some time, Marco Gastini passed away in Turin in 2018.