NINO GALIZZI

SCULPTOR

Biography

Nino Galizzi was born in Bergamo on March 12, 1891. He completed his first studies at the Andrea Fantoni School of Applied Art and at the Carrara Academy in Bergamo. He served in the military for almost six years during the period of the First World War (1915-1918). He fought on all fronts, in Macedonia, Serbia and Greece, earning promotions and decorations for valour. After the military parenthesis he resumed his studies and work in Rome, Florence and Paris. In 1921 he married Teresa Giandomenici, a teacher of painting, with whom he had three children, Paolo, Silvia and Bianca. He lived and worked alternately in Milan, Rome and Bergamo. He participated in countless and important national exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, the Quadriennale in Rome, the Permanente in Milan. He held various solo exhibitions both in Italy and abroad. For some time he taught plastic art at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo. He took part in the organization of competitions and prizes by being part of several Juries. There were also many collaborations with newspapers and magazines. Nino Galizzi died in Bergamo on September 20, 1975. Many of his works can be found in important private collections and in public buildings in Bergamo, Milan and Rome.

Essential

bibliography

Extracts

"... In the history of Italian sculpture of our century, undoubtedly this inadequately known and valued artist has his own safe and indisputable place, for originality and expressive breadth ..." CARLO L. RAGGHIANTI Critica d'Arte, Vallecchi Editori - N.112, Firenze 1968

"... A figure of not underestimated interest, for originality and expressive richness, singularly autonomous even where cultural calls appear more urgent and manifest ..." GIOVANNI ANZANI Exhibition Catalogue Posthumously, Bergamo 1988

"... Animous, statuary when required of him, Nino Galizzi, in the confines of his studio, seems to shy away from total commitment and constantly chooses the refined elegance of the fragment. The private world of this sculptor and therefore his most authentic world, is a gallery of fragments... of small headless or mutilated statues..." AGNOLDOMENICO PICA Nino Galizzi at the exhibition of Modern Art in Italy 1915-35, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence 1967

"... He speaks little but, on the other hand, he transfers to sculpture his particular dialectical rhythm, composed of delicate plastic accents, suffused with reversible mystical and sensual textures that give his works the precious nourishment of an experience carried out for the exclusively personal purposes of research ..." MIKLOS N. VARGA Nino Galizzi "Frammenti", Milano 1960, Esperia

"... The disagreement that makes these works alive and attractive is therefore, summing up, between the illustrative and the decorative element. Between mask and character. Between symbol and reality. Between acts of the limbs and expression of the faces. Between rigidity and softness, between a scratch and a caress. Between lasciviousness and chastity. Between the decadent and the primitive element... There is a taste of fragmentary... of the line, of the arabesque, of the rhythm, but at the same time there is the illustrative, almost literary taste of that particular and retractable human fellow, of that particular child, of that woman's breast or of that man's back ..." LEONARDO BORGESE Four studies on sculpture of Nino Galizzi, 1945

They write about him

Nino Galizzi is an artist of considerable interest in the field of Italian sculpture of the 1900’s, who deserves to be rediscovered and enhanced with a publication like this and, ideally, with a retrospective in which to explore more deeply his creative path, ranging from the 1910’s to his death in 1975. Along this wide period of time, Galizzi developed a style that combines different sources of inspiration - from Wildt and the Secession to the beginnings, to the influences of the twentieth century, to the constant reference of classical statuary - managing to find a completely personal synthesis, an autonomous language in balance between plastic sense and lyricism. While some works of public commission are characterized by a return to order and a solidity of twentieth-century ancestry, in the vast production of sculptures dedicated to the human figure and, in particular, to female nudes, Galizzi's most intimate and personal stylistic code emerges, which translates itself into sinuous bodies evocative of classical sculpture, sometimes in the form of fragments, lyrically indefinite and suspended in time. During his career, Galizzi has exhibited on numerous occasions at the Permanente, starting from the beginning of his artistic career, before obtaining some public recognition and participating in the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadrennial, up to the mature phase in the sixties. Galizzi was a member of the Permanente for several years, when the institution represented an essential point of reference for contemporary art in Milan: the numerous social exhibitions and other exhibitions in which he participated at our museum have contributed significantly to the development of his career. This very short text wants to testify the historical link between the sculptor and the Permanente, with the hope that this volume can represent a first step towards the rediscovery of an artist who is certainly worth knowing in greater detail, justly enhancing his contribution to the Italian sculpture of the twentieth century. LUCA CAVALLINI Curator Museum of the Permanente

"...To the initial secessionist hints, also derived from the lesson of Wildt, precisely in that insistent research on the line .......and which finds its maximum expression in the group of The Baptism of Christ of 1920-21, partly lost, Galizzi stages his highly personal classicism that feeds on cultured references, far, in my opinion, from the Rodinian, if not for some youthful iconographic contaminations... ... In the portrait of Maria Cortesi of 1921/24, the female face with an absent gaze, is enclosed in a bust- crater, transposing the daily-bourgeois connotations into a dimension of timelessness, in short, there is a mixture of ancient and extremely contemporary details, such as the hat and that sort of stole that marks the contour of the shoulders, while the bodice deliberately becomes a pretext to recall, with the repeated insistence of the slender folds, the robes of ancient Greek statues. Galizzi, therefore, is more interested in returning the idea of the subject than a precise portrait of him, conceiving it as a sort of architecture in its exclusively frontal pose and decidedly hermetic interpretation. This symbolic dimension is accentuated even more in the group "Sleep and Dream" of 1936, exhibited at the XX Venice Biennale. The theme of the dream is a theme dear to Metaphysics precisely because of its condition of suspension of existence. The female figure, caught in the act of a serene rest, is counterbalanced, both structurally and iconologically, by the unreal figure of the dream, translated into the character of Marsyas, this satyr holding the flute with which he has dared to challenge the god Apollo. In the earthly detachment of sleep, reality and myth meet." MARCELLA CATTANEO from: Immaginario Plastico - history of sculpture in Bergamo - Vol. 1° . 1900 – 1945 - Libri Aparte editore

"Galizzi, working in solitude, face to face with matter and with his own intuitions, found his original "classicism" in a dimension of present and daily beauty, which, more than the distant and timeless flavour of myth, has all the lyrical and existential sweetness of a familiar and accessible ideal." ... A series of torsos and female nudes begin to crowd Galizzi’s studio in which the sculptor experiments with a personal "poetics of the fragment": The archaic and mysterious poetry of these mutilated bodies would drag them off the present life if it were not for the vital flicker of a gesture, of a slight twist, of the lifting of a shoulder or of the bending of a knee, suddenly revealing them as living fragments, ... From Wildt to Rodin, from Mestrovic to Libero Andreotti, from the Viennese Secession to "Novecento", from classicism to the "return to order": without passively subjecting itself to any trend, Galizzi's creativity knew how to make his own the most diverse solicitations according to the needs of each individual work, to merge them into what was his original vision of life, heroic and poetic, but above all anxiously human. BARBARA MAZZOLENI by: Nino Galizzi Itinerary of the works in the city of Bergamo Edizioni Grafica e Arte - Bergamo

..."the first and oblivious meeting with Nino Galizzi is quickly told: one day now 11 years ago I was in the cemetery of Bergamo to admire the sculptural groups placed in memory of the deceased and to adorn the tombs. The passion of nobility and bourgeoisie is well known for the construction of family simulacra that, starting from 1800, transformed cemeteries into real open-air museums and these "alternative museums" could not but stimulate the curiosity and interest of an art student as I was at the time. It was during this visit that I noticed, shortly after entering, a sculptural group that struck me for the gestural and plastic composure with which the Pietà was represented and which gave dignity to the feeling of pain that the bronze itself wanted to convey. From this work, unsigned, I retraced the author's name, discovering, quite amazingly, a web page dedicated to him and edited by the Galizzi heirs themselves. My strong interest in wanting to reconstruct the artistic production of this sculptor from Bergamo led me to contact the heirs and to produce my modest and sometimes immature thesis work. In this short essay it is not the artistic qualities of Galizzi and his stylistic evolution that I am interested in examining and whose critical judgment I leave to those who are art scholars by profession, but instead I am interested in making a brief reference to the peculiarities and excursus of his artistic production, in order to better explain the motivations that have fired up my personal interest of research and which I believe are also the value of Galizzi's works. The artist's production can be divided into two strands: a public one, which refers to the great commissioned works and a more intimate and private one, partly shown in the various artistic exhibitions. ... With regard to the second strand, we find the various portraits, masks and nudes that refer to a balanced, rigid and severe style in plastic structuring, very close to Wildt and the classicist tradition, in clear contrast and rejection of the avant-garde proposals of the time. (Futurism and Cubism). Continuing his stylistic research in the wake of a neo-classicistic, in which we find works that are affected by a more expressive style and a drier, idealized and synthetic plastic art - Galizzi starts, beginning from the 1920s, a very original production of fragments, which I personally believe to be the most intimate, in which his freest artistic feeling emerges. Even these fragments are not exempt from their evolution and will result, in the last years of the sculptor's activity, in the creation of dancers and female figures ..... ... The observer, looking at Galizzi's fragments, is enraptured by the linear abstractions that fill the work with mystery and throw it into a sort of timeless and metaphysical dimension ... ... To sum up , it can be said that the artistic production of the sculptor is all aimed at the search for balance and harmony in the representation of the human being. And it is by referring to classical art and artistic traditions that Galizzi investigates human nature and infuses poetry and metaphysical/spiritual values into the work of art. As the artist himself once said " art summarizes life, it is its clearest mirror. Now art does not cheat or misrepresent life, as often does history. It tells the story of man and of the universe through him." MAURO PALAMINI from: Thesis - Academic Year 2008/2009 University of Pavia - Faculty of Letters and Philosophy Degree Course in Sciences of Cultural Heritage