Mario Logli Biography
Mario Logli was born in 1933 in Urbino, where he attended the Institute of Fine Arts and the Magisterium, learning the various graphic and engraving techniques and then specializing in lithography under the guidance of Carlo Ceci. After graduating from high school, he taught ornamental drawing at the same school (1954-1955). Since 1956 he has worked, again in Urbino, at the Bottega d'Arte of the ceramist Armando De Santi for a period of about 2 years; in contact with the tools of his new work, his imagination was able to create a dense series of images that left an incisive mark on the sector. This first cycle of activity, with the notable consensus of the critics who accompanied it, constituted a fundamental moment of maturation which gave the artist an awareness of his possibilities in the creative field. The capital of Montefeltro, rich in architecture by Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, by painters such as Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello and the Urbino artists Raffaello and Federico Barocci, leaves in Logli the seed that over time will bear the fruits visible in the works latest. In 1955 the opportunity arrived in the big city with the request of the Garzanti Publishing House which entrusted him with the illustrations of a series of classic texts. He then settled in Milan where he worked, as well as as an editorial illustrator, as a collaborator of Ezio Frigerio for the Piccolo Teatro with costume designs and scenography creations. Since 1964 he has been responsible for the illustrative sector of the De Agostini Publishing House. The contacts, on the one hand with the problems and contradictions of an industrial reality in turmoil, on the other with the living and conflictual fabric of contemporary culture and art, lead him to mature and define the themes and concepts of his activity pictorial. In this research process, the artist finds privileged moments of reflection in the solo exhibitions, each of which is characterized by the proposal of a central theme, almost as if the exhibition were a book to be leafed through, the paintings pages of a single work. From "No Man Land" (1970) to "Gli Invasori" (1975), from "Flying Islands" (1980) to "After the Triumphs" (1982), from "Teatro delle Memorie" (1984) to "Archeologia del Futuro " (1987), from "Silent Natures" (1992) and more recently to "Architectures of the Soul" (1996). Logli thus faces, in a close bond of the ironic and the tragic, the grotesque and the poetic, the pollutions of nature, the alienations and reifications of hetero-directed man, the unworkable proposals of 'restoration'. Far from a moralistic and disdainful criticism, Logli's speech constantly relaunches the 'open society', in the awareness that the largely choral and collective values of a modern democratic society can only be realized by men who are allowed to fully express one's personality, one's creative impulses and progress. After being featured in the Bolaffi catalogs for two years ('73-'74), he was chosen by a jury of European critics among the five best Italian artists of the moment. He wins the "Premio Lombardia" and the "Arte Fantastica" prize in Stuttgart. After being invited to the "Festival dei Due Mondi" in Spoleto, he was also invited in 1987 with an important personal exhibition dedicated to the places of Leopard's poetry, to represent his themes in the most prestigious capitals of Europe and the Americas. Invited, he then participates in European Art in Japan, Laforet Museum, Tokyo. More and more frequent are the exhibition participations and critical contributions towards his work which has always been characterized, in a continuous dialectical process, by the desire for the future and nostalgia for the past, by feeling and reason, intriguing coexistences that make the work of Logli an ever new opportunity for comparison and reflection between fantasies and reality, between escapes and returns.
