Jonathan Guaitamacchi Biography
Jonathan Guaitamacchi was born in London in 1961. Graduated from the Brera Academy in Milan, he lives between Milan, London and Cape Town; he collaborated during his formative years as a designer and artistic consultant for various architecture and design studios in Milan. He concentrated on painting in the early 1990s, creating highly evocative black and white urban landscapes. In 1997, after a period of work spent inside the disused plants at Bovisa in Milan, in the gasometer area, the AEM (Municipal Gas Energy Company) presented its first solo show inside the Officine della Pressione, precisely at Bovisa. In the same year he won the “Suzzara Award”, ex aequo, 1997/98 edition. He began to exhibit in Italy and abroad, especially in South Africa, the landscape often taken as the subject of his typical bird's eye views ("Target" series) which characterize his unmistakable perspective cut and make him known to the great public. He has numerous exhibitions to his credit in Europe, China, South Africa and America. Known for sweeping visions of global cities, urban landscapes and panoramic views from one place to another, Guaitamacchi paints landscapes whose debauchery comes directly from memory, from the memory that binds the artist to the English territory and the Anglo-Saxon culture from which he comes. The imposing cliffs of Dover or the M25 (London's ring road) thus become real gateways, places that continually stimulate the artist's imagination. Guaitamacchi works on space, delves into the third dimension, depth, and interprets architecture as a language, as an obsession, as a repetition of a way. His canvases, real architectural projects, tell his vision. In an era in which landscape and urban visions are subjects loved and taken up by various contemporary artists, Guaitamacchi makes a difference. Among the first in the contemporary era to approach the urban context, "on the canvas he does not represent the total or merely architectural expression of reality, he releases its essence, the active principle, he does not describe the place, but its reflection, its metaphor through his unique and unmistakable style". He was recently the protagonist of an important solo exhibition at the Giampiero Biasutti gallery in Turin and at the Barbican Center in London on the occasion of the Olympic Games. He will soon be involved in new important exhibitions that will take him back to South Africa and China.
