Enzo Gagliardino Biography
Enzo Gagliardino was born in Brandizzo (Turin), in 1949. At the age of 18 he left his city and began traveling around the world. This experience led him to stay for short or long periods in Europe (Paris, Marseille, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Brussels, London) and then in South America, Africa and the Far East. It is in these years that he meets artists such as Hans Hartung, Vasarely, Mondino, Biras, Arroyo and it is in these years that, just as the Center Pompidou is being born in Paris, Enzo Gagliardino frequents the most important art and European museums and becomes passionate to the History of Art. In 1973 he returned to Italy and began to self-taught painting. The first subjects are waiting rooms, canteens, hospital corridors, boxing gyms: closed spaces that refer to a Kafkaesque vision of existence. Between 1976 and the beginning of the eighties, the artist worked on a cycle of works focusing on the theme of detention. These are medium to large pictorial works, with a strong emotional impact, which represent prison structures or restraint beds. The transition from closed and suffocating environments to urban architecture occurred in the 1980s, when Enzo Gagliardino began painting facades, windows and street furniture, elements that define the sky line of the metropolises of the global world.
