Massimo Giannoni Biography
Massimo Giannoni was born in Empoli in 1954. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where in 1979 he won the Lubiam Prize, together with Hans Hartung, tutor of the event, awarded to the best student of all the Academies of Fine Arts in Italy. After the first two solo exhibitions held at the Vivita Gallery in Florence (1985, 1987), he decided to move to Australia, to Sydney, where he executed a series of commissioned portraits and at the same time worked on large abstract paintings, executed with the watercolor technique on waxed paper. Before returning definitively to Italy he moved to the United States for a period, continuing to work as a commissioned portraitist and as an abstract painter, exhibiting in Chicago in 1996 and 1997 at Thomas Monahan Fine Arts. Having returned to Italy, he began to paint in oils, experimenting with a very material technique, made up of high layers of color that allow him to create images that are perceived up close in an informal abstract way, and which gradually take on a realistic appearance and a more defined shape. that we move away from the painting. His favorite themes are libraries, where the overlapping of stacked volumes, with the ribs of the books inside the shelves, allude to stories already read and others yet to be read, projecting the observer into his own experience, and the interiors of bags , far from the static and accumulable reality of libraries, illuminated by almost psychedelic LEDs. Other places of great fascination for him are the half-empty and neglected rooms, where an armchair or some book on the floor suggest a previous passage of man, but also the ancient palaces of the Florentine nobility, such as the great Palazzo Serristori or, as in this last exhibition, the plaster casts and the large rooms of a museum. Among his public exhibitions: Off topic / Italian feeling, as part of the XIV Quadrennial of Rome, held at the Palazzo Delle Esposizioni in Rome in 2005, the same year in which he also inaugurated the exhibition Il Paesaggio Italiano Contemporaneo at the Palazzo Ducale in Gubbio , followed by the exhibition 1968-2007, Italian Art, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, held in 2007 at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, and in 2011 by his presence at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. In 2019, on the occasion of the celebrations for the anniversary of the Italian Republic, he inaugurated a personal exhibition at the Palais des Nations in Geneva; finally, in 2020, as part of the Contemporary Quirinale, two of his paintings were acquired in the collection of the Quirinale Palace in Rome.
