Alberto Abate Biography
Alberto Abate (Rome, 16 March 1946 – Rome, 9 March 2012) was an Italian painter, among the main exponents of the artistic movement of Cultured Painting. In the 1950s Abate attended the local Art Institute in Catania: his teachers were the sculptor Domenico Tudisco and the painter Giuseppe Giuffrida. After graduating, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts and, at nineteen, received his first position as a teacher of "Life Drawing" at the Art Institute of Catania, a position he held until 1973. The following year he moved to Padua to teach at the “Pietro Selvatico” Art Institute. In 1980 Abate was among the protagonists of the cultural and artistic renewal project promoted by Plinio de Martis's “La Tartaruga” gallery (Rome) and with the historic collective An exhibition of six painters inaugurated the birth of the aesthetics of the movement known as Anachronism . The Anachronist painters, in open contrast with the conceptual experiences that had monopolized the artistic system in the Seventies, claim a vision of figurative art not conditioned by time, understanding their creative activity as a 'return to Painting' through the recovery of its traditional language and its aesthetic, historical and technical memory. The Anacronista movement is present in the 1982 exhibition La Pittura Colta curated by Italo Mussa at the Roman gallery “Pio Monti”, in which Abate takes part together with Carlo Maria Mariani, Ubaldo Bartolini and Roberto Barni. The re-elaboration of his theoretical vision dates back to the end of the 1990s, which led him to identify syncretism as the necessary culmination of art at the end of the millennium. Abate taught "History of contemporary art" and "Semiology of visual arts" at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Catania and collaborated with the cultural page of Corriere del Veneto's Corriere della Sera. Edward Lucie-Smith highlights Abate as one of the twenty most representative Italian artists of the last decades of the twentieth century (ArToday, Phaidon Press, London 1995) and places him among the leading artists of the international neoclassical movement (ArTomorrow, Terrail, Paris 2002). Linda Kaiser, in her Anachronism and the Return to Painting: the Origin and the Goal (Silvana Editoriale, Milan 2003), places Abate among the major exponents of the movement and Sylvano Bussottigli dedicates a chapter of his Alphabetical Disorder (Spirali Edizioni, Milan 2002). He passed away after a short illness in 2012 at the age of 65.
