Silvano Girardello Biography
Silvano Girardello (Giacciano con Baruchella, 28 May 1928 – Verona, 27 June 2016) was an Italian painter. He graduated from the Liceo Artistico in Bologna. He enrolled in the faculty of architecture which he abandoned after three years to dedicate himself to painting. Since 1955 he has taught artistic education in middle schools and since 1984 he has held the Chair of Painting at the Gian Bettino Cignaroli Academy of Fine Arts in Verona, of which he will also become director for a few years. Since the end of the 1950s, Girardello has represented an original voice in contemporary Italian painting and beyond, he was a cultured artist attentive to the cultural and artistic debate of his time. He cannot be inserted into a precise pictorial current, the term "plurilingualism" is the one that more than any other connotes almost all of his work. He often takes as a model works by painters of the past such as Paolo Veronese, Renoir, Goya, Millet, Van Gogh, Munch, Bacon. The history of art becomes a reservoir from which it takes quotes that varies multiple times. Between 1957 and 1961 he began to exhibit in various group exhibitions, in 1961 at the Parma Biennale and in the same city he held his first solo exhibition in the same year. It is the period of the series dedicated to the victims of Hiroshima. In 1965 he held his first solo exhibition in Verona, at the Galleria Ferrari. Verona is the city to which he moved with his family in 1933 and where he lived and worked all his life. From 1964 and throughout the sixties he began to use other techniques in addition to painting, such as the inclusion of plastic, oilcloth, photographs and other materials in his paintings. It is the period considered "pop", in fact it is close to "pop art". He also created many graphics, serigraphs and lithographs. In 1967 he joined the Intrarealista Group and exhibited in the 1967 Palazzo Strozzi collective exhibition, among others Santomaso, Finotti, Vivarelli, Mellini. In the 70s he returned to painting and began the series of "The Rape of Europe" starting from the work of Paolo Veronese of Palazzo Ducale. In the 80s and 90s he painted paintings with themes of interiors, country beasts, walks which he exhibited in 1990 at the Scudo gallery in Verona, in 1992 was the cycle of "Painting within a painting" and in 1995 the cycle of " The Angelus", starting from Millet's well-known work, he studies it, proposes it again, breaks it down into more than seventy variations until the early 2000s. In the period 2004-2006 he returns to more intimate themes, paints the landscapes of childhood and takes up again the authors and works that characterized his career.
