Elio Borgonovo Biography
Elio Borgonovo was born in Milan in 1930. From a modest and soundly principled family, he spent his childhood and adolescence in Calvairate, a popular neighborhood on the then outskirts of Milan. From a very young age he experimented with brushes and colors (lithographic, - cyan, magenta, yellow and black, which his father, Piero, who works in a lithography, brought home to him). Upon meeting Nemi, he finds the right support and determination to transform his shy talent into artistic awareness. The still lifes, the views, the courtyards or his railings, from that moment on, will be the protagonists of his works, created and proposed in various extemporaneous, collective and competitions, in various Italian cities. In Milan, personal exhibitions, in prestigious galleries such as Schettini, Vinciana and Barbaroux, confirm the artistic growth of Borgonovo, now recognized as "the painter of old Milan". In 1968 he was awarded the "Ambrogino d'oro”* and won the first prize in the “Milan on the Palette” event. In 1974 he took part in the collective exhibition held at the Museum of Milan, reserved for some particularly significant Milanese and Lombard artists. [Elio Borgonovo receives the Ambrogino d'oro in 1968] With the patronage of the Municipality of Milan, in 1986, he exhibits an important solo exhibition, entitled "Dialectal Images" at the Milan Museum. The following year he brings "his" Milan on the island of Cuba, at the Museo de la Ciudad de la Habana. Borgonovo's second artistic phase developed far from his city, in the Canary Islands, where he moved with his wife Nemi in the 1990s his hometown, and allowing himself to be influenced by the intense colors of the eternal Canarian spring, his painting experiences a second phase. He then interprets his houses, with a detached and premonitory perspective at the same time Milan” also includes works that are almost surreal in their representation, and tacitly far-sighted in their concept. Elio Borgonovo died in Milan on 31 January 2014. After Nemi's long illness, six months after her death, the "bad evil" that had been "dormant" in him for five years woke up, taking away her body, but not his art.
