Roberto Barni biography

Roberto Barni is a Tuscan painter and sculptor counted among the exponents of the Cultivated Painting movement, theorized by the critic Italo Mussa in the 1980s. Born in Pistoia in 1939. In 1959 he began to paint his first abstract paintings, using wood, iron and newspaper.
His first exhibitions date back to 1960, mostly linked to a Pop figuration within the so-called Scuola di Pistoia.
In 1962 he exhibited his Obituary. In Rome he met Cesare Vivaldi, who invited him to participate in the exhibition Revort I - Documents of Objective Art in Europe, in Palermo in 1965. In this period Roberto Barni was interested in a type of minimalist-conceptual experience which was later surpassed when with a symbolic work, Resurrection from 1972 (10 years after having exhibited his obituary) he returned to history and painting. From 1966 to 1973 he exhibited at the Zoom Studio in Pistoia, at Flori in Florence, at the Selected Artist Galleries in New York, at Van de Loo in Munich, by Charles Lienhrd in Basel.
In 1976 he used the term anachronism for the first time, claiming that the artist must have a vision of art that escapes the concept of time: it is not conditioned by it or by techniques and materials of contemporaneity. Some critics such as Italo Mussa, Maurizio Calvesi and Marisa Vescovo begin to promote this artistic vision, but Roberto Barni does not want to be associated with a particular movement, preferring personal research.
From 1980 to 1983 Roberto Barni executed the iconographic cycle Paternità. In the same period he painted a series of canvases from the series The adventures of domestic thought, in which the blindfolded man appears for the first time, a fundamental element of human conflict and a key character in Barni's poetic journey .
In recent years the exhibition activity and notoriety of the Pistoia artist increased greatly, leading him to exhibit not only in Italy, but also in the main European cities and in America.
In the early eighties he exhibited at the Festival dei due Mondi in Spoleto, in Florence, in Milan at the Galleria d'Arte dell'Ariete, in Paris and in 1985 in New York at the Queens Museum and at the Shape Gallery. From this moment Barni's contacts with the United States will never cease: the artist takes part in major international exhibitions such as A new Romanticism in Washington D.C and in Ohio, Avant-garde in the Eighties at the County Museum in Los Angeles. In Europe he participated in the Venice Biennale as a sculptor in 1988, and in the Monte Carlo Sculpture Biennale. In this period Roberto Barni began to dedicate himself more and more to sculpture and created the works: Atto muto, Filastrocca, Vacina, Oposte Vedute.
In 1997 he exhibited at the Fabbroni Palace and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, in 1999 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Reims.
The collective Fermentazioni dates back to 2000 with Antonino Bove, Giuseppe Chiari, Omar Galliani and Marco Nereo Rotelli at the Palazzo Ducale in Lucca.
From 1999 to 2000 he created several sculptures, including Continuo for the Daniel Spoerri collection in Seggiano and La grande Vacina for the Pecci Museum in Prato .
In 2001 he collaborated with Alessandro Bagnai and Alessandro Poggiali, presenting the works in Florence and Siena. In 2002 he participated in group exhibitions such as Something Happened at the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, The modernity of melancholy at the Palazzo della Ragione in Verona .
Roberto Barni currently lives and works in Florence, continuing to exhibit in Italy and the rest of the world.