Mauro Chessa Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Mauro Chessa (Turin, 26 March 1933) is an Italian painter. Born in Turin in 1933 into a family of artists, his grandfather Carlo Chessa was a well-known engraver and his father Gigi Chessa, a painter, was one of the founders of the Sei group of Turin. Read the full biography

Mauro Chessa (Turin, 26 March 1933) is an Italian painter. Born in Turin in 1933 into a family of artists, his grandfather Carlo Chessa was a well-known engraver and his father Gigi Chessa, a painter, was one of the founders of the Sei group of Turin. He began his exhibition activity in 1954 by participating in a collective exhibition Undici young painters of Turin. His painting from an initial adherence to existential realism and after a period in which it is influenced by action painting evolves towards figuration, a figuration which after an initial influence of Bacon, evident in the works of the early 60s, becomes increasingly personal characterized by a strong expressive and narrative charge. at the end of the 60s he suspended his painting to dedicate himself to animated and experimental underground cinema, he resumed painting after 1974. On the occasion of an exhibition at the Gian Ferrari gallery in Milan in 1979 the writer Giovanni Arpino, precisely to underline the narrative character of Chessa's work, he writes "Chessa was right in keeping quiet. He had to rediscover the reasons for narrating" In 2010 he received the Cesare Pavese Prize for Painting A Life for Art with the following motivation: "The intense and multifaceted artistic path developed by Mauro Chessa, as an exponent of the visual culture that from the second half of the 20th century has reached the new millennium, expresses the sense of research that is always high in content, resolved through a figuration of high expressive quality". In 1992 he received the painting prize of the municipality of Guarene.