Raffaele Leomporri Biography
Raffaele Leomporri was born in Rome in 1926. During the war years, he met Renato Guttuso, with whom he worked in the studio of Villa Massimo. There, Guttuso's studio, together with those of Leoncillo, Mancini and Mazzacurati, became a meeting place for artists and critics of the Roman environment, where realism and abstractionism, new figuration and Marxism were discussed.
The artist with a realist tendency had his first solo exhibition in 1956 at the Galleria Il Pincio in Rome, while three years later he exhibited at the Galleria La Nuova Pesa. In the Sixties, his artistic research started in a new direction, oriented towards a new figuration that was fueled by further ideas from pop imagery and cinematographic images, with an expressionist accent of Guttusian origin.
Unfortunately, in 1974, the artist died in Philadelphia. His works are present in the collections of the Pinacoteca of La Spezia and Siena, at the Tate Gallery and the Contemporary Art Society in London.
