Piero Gauli Biography
Piero Gauli (Milan, 6 June 1916 – Milan, 4 January 2012) was an Italian painter and set designer. He was the last exponent of the current group to die in 2012. Initially his main activity was that of a set designer, his first work in this sense was the set design for Pirandello's La Giara at the Verdi theater in Padua, a job that of the set designer where the traits of his painting are already evident, this is how Elena Pontiggia describes her first scenography, a dangerous environment, marked by a steep expressionist perspective and divided asymmetrically by a crooked pillar [1]. His arrival at the current group in 1940 was a natural consequence of his style, his painting where the figures are excavated and loaded with colour, a strongly expressionist style rich in reds of Venetian ancestry, which excavates the material like a hard-working sculptor, a work to be compared by Gauli's own admission to the Comacine masters, the fabulations around the Comacini Magistri to whom I am linked by paternal descent, still today engages and captivates me, which looks at the experience of Oskar Kokoschka and Northern Europe, an art that of Kokoschka at that time considered degenerate by the Nazi regime. His are colours, as Guido Piovene wrote, reviewing the University exhibition of 1938 where Gauli made his debut, shrill, bright, almost rude ones which he spreads with fat brushstrokes in his landscapes [3]. In that period his expressionist style was linked above all to exponents of the current group such as Badodi and Cassinari or Sassu himself, who will present it in a solo show in 1954, less so to the realistic painting advocated by Guttuso or Migneco. In the years of joining the movement, he continued his activity as a set designer for the Corrente group for the director Paolo Grassi, who created the scenographic installation of Beniamino Joppolo's The Last Station at the Milan Triennale (among the actors of the show was also Giorgio Strehler). He will participate in the current initiatives until the group's final collective in 1941 and again until his departure for the Russian front in 1942, the date in which he breaks away from the active current group. During the war he was interned in the Nazi camp in Cholm. At that time he produced several drawings that tell of his experience as a fighter. Subsequently, upon his return from prison, his work will always remain linked to his first experience and even if the character and strength of the line will weaken, it will always be characterized by the expressionist sign, as in the first part of his activity which is considered the most interesting and fruitful of his career. Among the activities he carried out he was also a good ceramist. In 2016 after his death, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, the Brera Academy dedicated a conference to his figure as an artist.
