Giuseppe De Gregorio biography

Giuseppe De Gregorio was an Italian painter. He was born in 1920 in Spoleto. Despite his father being a painter and his grandfather a painting teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts of Catania, Giuseppe De Gregorio approached painting as a self-taught artist.
Since 1947 he participated in both group and solo exhibitions and in 1948 he won the City of Orvieto Prize. Initially influenced by cubism, in the early fifties he adhered to Informal Art.
In 1953 he founded, together with Filippo Marignoli, Giannetto Orsini, Ugo Rambaldi, Piero Raspi, and Bruno Toscano, the Spoleto Group or Group of Six. In the same year the Spoleto Group established the Spoleto Prize, aimed at promoting young artists. On this occasion he was noticed by Bruno Sargentini of the Galleria L'Attico in Rome who began to represent him.
He participated in the VII National Quadriennale of Art in Rome in 1956, the ninth in 1966, and the eleventh in 1986. In 1964 he took part in the XXXII Venice Biennale and the Fiorino Prize of Florence.
During this period he decided to move to the representation of details of nature, charging it with symbolic meanings. This evolution places him in the so-called Naturalism with the recovery and insertion of nature subjects within the informal structure.
In 1974 he moved to Florence with his wife Rosa and daughter Daniela while always remaining connected to his hometown.
In 1977 the Festival dei Due Mondi dedicated a solo exhibition to him and in 1978 he created the poster for the 21st edition of the Festival. In 1986 and 1999 he created the poster for Umbria Jazz.
In 1997 he definitively returned to live in Spoleto. Giuseppe De Gregorio passed away on December 31, 2007, in his home in Spoleto.