Manlio Bacosi biography
- MANLIO BACOSI PAINTER
Manlius of Bacchus was a Italian painter born in Perugia in 1921.
Creative vitality and expressive originality are just some of the main characteristics of Manlio Bacosi, considered one of the best known Italian landscape architects. From painting to graphics, from ceramic decoration to sculpture, Manlio Bacosi confirms himself as one of the most prolific post-war artists.
He trained in the sculptor's studio Leo Ravazzi and the futurist painter Gerard Doctors. He began exhibiting in 1947 and since then has organized numerous one-man shows in Italy and abroad.
In 1951, at only thirty years of age, Manlio Bacosi was invited, on the recommendation of Gerardo Dottori, to the first exhibition on Futurism after the war, at the Palazzo del Podestà in Bologna, in the section of young people identified as prosecutors of thefuturist artistic avant-garde. At that time Manlio Bacosi explored the abstract and the informal, however the Umbrian landscape of Dottori's aero-painting season will influence the young artist to such an extent that he will devote himself entirely to it for the rest of his life, being considered in all respects the continuer of Umbrian landscaping.
In the works of Manlio Bacosi, the landscape undergoes a profound process of reduction and synthesis which leads the artist to represent a minimal world, indicated by a few signs on flat and uniform layers of colors in a two-dimensional space. In this context the artist intervenes with a certain gestural nature that leads him to superimpose even more mysterious and hermetic pictorial signs on this reality.
In addition to landscapes, among his favorite themes there are also still lifes of which the concept evolves, applying it to subjects that float in the colored void or in simple, however elaborate, geometries.
Even the pottery demonstrate new distinctive traits, works resulting from an intense creative activity that perceives color according to new, less clear, more blurred forms.
In 1972 the city of Todi presented an anthological exhibition in his honor at the Palazzo Comunale.
In 1975 in Recanati on the occasion of Leopardi's demonstrations, Manlio Bacosi presented a vast collection of his works in the municipal halls. Also in 1975, the city of Montecatini organized a one-man show of over 50 of his works. In December of the same year, the Municipality of Rome presented a vast one-man show in the halls of Palazzo Braschi.
In March 1976, an anthological exhibition of over 80 works took place in the Municipality of Perugia.
In 1979 he was awarded the San Valentino d'Oro International Prize for the Figurative Arts. In July of the same year, an anthological exhibition at the San Marino museum was organized by the Municipality.
In May 1982 it was the turn of the great personal exhibition with 80 works in the Saloni della Molinella in Faenza under the patronage of the Municipality.
Manlio Bacosi died in Perugia in 1998.