Marco Gerra Biography
Marco Gerra was born in Reggio Emilia in 1925. He attended the art school between Reggio Emilia and Modena, becoming a pupil of Renzo Ghiozzi, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 1946, where he met teachers such as Morandi, Guidi, Mandelli and Longhi. The Modena environment played an important role in his artistic training, thanks to the significant exhibitions organized by the city's "room of friends of art", which allowed him to get to know the painters Reggiani, Maccari, Casorati, Corsi, Spazzapan, Afro . Gerra's debut works were figurative in nature and in 1952 he had his first solo exhibition in Reggio Emilia. In 1955 he won the Diomira Prize at the National Quadrennial in Rome and the Bevilacqua Prize in Venice. Subsequently, his interest turned to the navigation and dynamism of signs and forms in space, and his artistic streak oriented towards the informal. Gerra was fascinated by the elements "space, color, light", present in all his subsequent works up to the abstract-geometric research, to which he remained faithful until his last tests with the computer. Gerra has also established an engaging relationship with music, favoring twelve-tone music. This led to the creation of works inspired by sequential modernity and sound/modularity, expressed through the use of musical notes. Gerra was an ethically committed artist, defending the fundamental values of his art without any concession to fashion or the market and without grammatical errors or errors in execution. He died in Reggio Emilia on 31 August 2000.
