Piero Brianza Biography
Piero Maggioni (1931 - 1995) spent his childhood at the Don Guanella Institute in Como until 1944 due to the premature death of his parents in 1933. In 1946 he attended an evening drawing course at the Castello Sforzesco. The pictorial adventure began in the 1950s, straddling neorealism and abstract painting, the two trends that had divided the Corrente painters after the end of their association. Maggioni's beginnings arise from the combination of these two lines and are marked by a still academic figuration and a classic figurative structure. The Sixties saw Stella's assiduous attendance at Gameragna, near Albissola, which allowed him to continue and give rise to new artistic encounters and fertile exchanges of ideas. In fact, Albissola, the hub of twentieth-century ceramic art, was then frequented by the biggest names on the Italian artistic scene. In the first half of the Seventies he worked assiduously and exhibited very frequently, his compositions are characterized by a thickening of the material texture, we can speak of a full pictorial maturity. His works are welcomed in famous public collections, from the Kunsthalle in Basel to the Kunsthaus in Zurich, as well as the Galleria Umjetnina in Split, the Schweizerisches Alpines Museum in Bern, and Ca' Pesaro in Venice. In 1985, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the birth of Alessandro Manzoni, in addition to exhibiting in Lecco in the exhibition Un commitment for Manzoni, the artist created the bronze portal of the parish church of Barzio, in the Como area, taking inspiration from religious scenes described by the illustrious literary. The nineties were the years of his illness, which caused a temporary interruption of his work, which was then resumed with his last pictorial cycle, the Cycling Microstories, a sign of a very decisive stylistic and thematic change.