Mirko Basaldella Biography
Mirko Basaldella (Udine, 28 September 1910 – Cambridge, 24 November 1969) was an Italian sculptor and painter. Brother of Afro and Dino Basaldella, he studied at the Art School of Venice, the Academy of Florence and the School of Art in Monza. He worked in Arturo Martini's studio as a student until 1933, then moved to Rome. Here he met the artists of the Roman school such as: Scipione, Corrado Cagli (whose sister Serena he married), Antonietta Raphaël, Fazzini, Mazzacurati, Leoncillo. He held his first exhibition in 1935 at the Galleria La Cometa, a gallery owned by Countess Mimì Pecci Blunt and in which Libero de Libero and a very young Corrado Cagli were artistic directors. A trip to Paris, taken in 1937 together with his brother Afro, opened him to a more complete vision of art, leaving the confines of Mediterranean culture and absorbing the European one. In 1935 he settled in Rome and joined the Milanese Corrente group. In New York, at the Knoedler gallery in 1947 he held an exhibition which he repeated in the following two years. Between 1949 and 1951 he created the three gates of the Fosse Ardeatine, an imposing bronze sculpture. This significant experience directed Basaldella towards the search for a new way of making sculpture, with structures and materials different from those traditionally used, including concrete, metal mesh, iron wire, plastic materials. In 1957 he was called to direct the Design work shop at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts of Harvard University in Cambridge in Massachusetts, from here his sculpture was oriented towards technological, mechanistic directions and towards fantastic stimulations of the sacral craftsmanship of the red Indians, some themes sculptures were brought back into archaeological forms. In the following years there were many visits to oriental culture, mythical iconology, totems, Assyrian, Mesopotamian, Jewish and pre-Columbian finds. The period from 1953 to 1960 was characterized by the use of cut copper and brass sheets. From that period are the series of the Lions of Damascus and the Chimeras. In 1962 he participated, together with the most important international sculptors of the time, in the Sculptures in the City exhibition organized by Giovanni Carandente as part of the V Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. He presented two bronze sculptures from 1961: Totem and Toothed Pattern. In the second half of the sixties he dedicated himself to a new series of painted woods, the latest bronzes and small bronzes arise from the sculptor's ability to shape every type of material, from waste materials to bricks, to the residues of industrial wrapping materials. Finally, the openly figurative themes inspired by the biblical theme of the 1930s also reappear, full of refined cultural memories.
