Silvano Bozzolini Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Silvano Bozzolini was born on 3 November 1911 in Fiesole. He began to approach painting in 1927, when he decided to move to Milan to study at the Brera Academy. Read the full biography

Silvano Bozzolini was born on 3 November 1911 in Fiesole. He began to approach painting in 1927, when he decided to move to Milan to study at the Brera Academy. A few years later, starting from 1933, he made some trips to Switzerland, Vienna and Sofia in Bulgaria where his friend and painter Vera Nedkova lived. In Sofia, between December and January 1934-35, he organized his first personal exhibition at the "Casa degl'Italiani". Returning to Florence in 1935, he enrolled in the Scuola Libera del Nudo of the Academy of Fine Arts under the guidance of the painter Felice Carena and four years later, in 1939, he participated in the III National Quadrennial of Art in Rome, where he exhibited a nature dead. During the difficult years of the war, Bozzolini continued to draw, as evidenced by some of his works, including "A glimpse of Tirana", "Albanian Shepherd" or "Country of Montenegro", exhibited in October 1942 in his solo show at the Lyceum in Florence . In 1945, after the war, he returned to Florence where he kept his studio in Piazza Donatello and founded together with Ferdinando Berti, Mario Calderai, Arrigo Dreoni and Angelo Maria Landi the "La Porta" Contemporary Art Center, in Via Cavour in Florence , with the desire to "promote a vast movement in the field of figurative arts by developing and stimulating such productive exchanges between artists from all over the world". The group's intent was to "promote the presentation to the public of all those artists who were worthy", establish an annual Painting and Sculpture Prize and "take care of the publication of a monthly bulletin". The following year, in the rooms of "La Porta", he held a personal exhibition accompanied by a catalog with a well-known criticism by Antony de Witt. Bozzolini actively participated in the cultural debate that animated post-war Florence, he had the desire to go further, to arrive at new pictorial experiments, to engage with national art, without falling, as Adriano Seroni writes, into "provincialism" or "regionalism ". In the spring of the same year, "Content and Form of the New Reality" was organized at the Galleria Firenze, the first exhibition of the "Arte d'oggi" group born from the union of the different Florentine tendencies that had developed in the post-war period with the "Arte d'oggi" group La Porta", to which were also added Tordi, Grazzini and Faraoni, the one around the small magazine "Torrente" with Vinicio Berti, Fernando Farulli, Bruno Brunetti and Gualtiero Nativi and finally a small group of foreign artists including Enrico Steiner, Eduard Bargheer and Slavko Kopač. Bozzolini, despite having created some abstract works since 1944, still operated close to a certain post-cubist taste, as happened during the group's first exhibition "Arte d'oggi" (1947), showing "traces of the passage from Florence, then validated by going to Paris, of the French modern art exhibition." This language of his did not last long because, in 1947, the year in which he decided to move to the French capital, he definitively abandoned figuration to dedicate himself to abstractionism. In 1954 he participated in the Espace exhibition. Architecture Formes Couleur, an important exhibition event by Groupe Espace organized in Biot from 10 July to 10 September. Bozzolini exhibited two works: an outdoor, mobile painting, 4.56 meters high and a wall panel on a steel plate. In 1976, in addition to exhibiting at the Galerie Sapone in Nice, the municipality of Poggibonsi, where Bozzolini had spent the difficult war years, dedicated the exhibition Silvano Bozzolini - "33 years of painting - 1943-1976" to him. In the following decades, there were also numerous personal and collective exhibitions, his activity was very intense, and his work is now widely appreciated both nationally and internationally. In 1991 he donated 120 woodcuts to the Département des Estampes et de la Photographie of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, covering his entire production from his Parisian stay. He died on February 11, 1998.