Marco Gastini biography

Marco Gastini was an Italian artist born in Turin in 1938. He trained at the School of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts of Turin where he diploma in 1960 and in the same year he 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 The Alba Bonfire Gallery. Two years later, he began teaching at the Liceo Artistico, a position he held until 1985. In 1967-68 he created his first spray paintings which he exhibited in 1968 at the Galleria Il Punto in Turin. The following year he participated in the Salone dell'Annunciata in Milan with some paintings on plexiglass. Also from those years were the first fusions of lead and antimony on walls presented at the collective exhibition Arte e Critica '70, held at the Galleria Civica of Modena.
In 1975 he held a solo show at the Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles, on the occasion of which he presented the work 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 works. In recent years the use of color also made its appearance together with the most diverse materials: from wood to stone, from parchment to iron.
The exhibition activity and collaboration with Italian, European and American galleries continues intense. In 2001, his city, Turin, dedicated a major retrospective to him curated by Pier Giovanni Castagnoli and Helmut Friedel at the Galleria D'Arte Moderna in the spaces of the Promoter, and subsequently in Monaco , at the Lenbachhaus in the Kunstbau space. Sick for some time now, Marco Gastini passed away in Turin in 2018.