Pericle Fazzini biography

- PERICLES FAZZINI PAINTER

 

Pericle Fazzini was an Italian sculptor and painter. He was born in Grottammare in 1913.

He approached sculpture in his carver father's workshop and, on the advice of the poet Mario Rivosecchi, he was sent to Rome in 1930 to study at the Free School of the Nude at the Academy of Fine Arts .

In 1931 he won the competition for the funeral monument of Cardinal Dusmet in Catania. The following year he took part in the competition for the National Artistic Pensioner, obtaining a scholarship with which he would maintain a studio in Rome for the next three years.

In 1935 Pericle Fazzini participated in the II Quadrennial of Rome obtaining a prize for the high reliefs Dance and Tempesta. In 1938 he opened his own studio in Via Margutta, where he remained for the rest of his life, and joined the artistic movement Corrente which gathered around the Milanese art magazine of the same name. In the same year he participated in the XXI Venice Biennale with a group of sculptures that consecrated him to the highest levels of European sculpture: the portrait of Ungaretti, Moments of solitude, Boy who listen and Young man declaiming.

In 1947 he won the Premio Torino with the work Anita Standing and took part in the exhibition of the Fronte Nuovo per le Arti, with Emilio Widow and Renato Guttuso. In 1949 he won the Saint Vincent Prize with the work Sibilla and participated in the Twentieth-Century Italian Art exhibition at the MoMa in New York. In 1951 he held his first anthology at the Fondazione Premi Roma. In 1954 he returned to the Venice Biennale, winning first prize for sculpture.

In 1955 Pericle Fazzini began teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, while from 1958 until 1980 he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.

Between the end of the fifties and the sixties he worked on monumental projects  including the portal of the church of San Giovanni Battista on the A1, the Fountain for the Palazzo dell' ENI in Rome, the Monument for the Resistance in Ancona.

In 1970 he began the Resurrection for the Sala Nervi in ​​the Vatican, which will only be exhibited in 1977 and which can be considered his most famous work.

The last years of his prestigious career saw the organization of two important anthologies in 1983 in Avezzano and the following year at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.

Pericle Fazzini died in Rome in 1987.