Roberto Malquori Biography
Roberto Malquori (Castelfiorentino, 1 September 1929) is an Italian artist. In Florence, in 1963, Gruppo 70 was active, theorizing a technological art whose attributes were self-irony and self-criticism and which was interested in being contaminated by different disciplines: poetry, sociology, photography, theater and more. Malquori joins it by participating in various exhibitions and events. After his first solo exhibition, in April 1964 at the Galleria L'Indiano in Florence, Malquori visited the Venice Biennale where he had the opportunity to verify that his work was in harmony with the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, leading exponents plan of American Pop Art. In 1965 he participated in the Bauhaus Situationist movement that Jørgen Nash founded after the separation from the International Situationist movement theorized by Guy Debord. Situationism aims to create situations in which individuals can become aware participants in life and not passive observers of the spectacle that is proposed to us by the mass media: this is one of the objectives of Malquori's work, an objective which he pursues faithfully over the years by constantly participating to the activity of the Swedish group; In fact, his last exhibition at the Drakabygget in Gothenburg dates back to 2001. In 1969 he was among the artists who supported the activity of the Tèchne Center and the Tèchne magazine founded by Eugenio Miccini. Malquori, using rotogravures and what consumer journalism offers day by day, with an original technique for transporting typographical inks, composes new images crowded with faces, figures, references, writings, freeing them from their original context and providing them with new meanings. Regarding his works, there has been talk of an amusement park atmosphere, but also of last judgment and illuminated codex. Malquori presents us the world with images that form images and offers us a vision of the contemporary world using the same materials that flood us every day where the influence of the mass media becomes increasingly difficult to resist. Malquori carries out an operation that turns out to be an antidote to the hidden and overt persuaders of mass communication. It is certainly a constant reminder of our personal and collective memory that allows each spectator to enjoy his works in an individual and conscious way. His work can definitely be inserted into the Pop art genre with very polemical intentions also common to New Dada. In 2007 he exhibited a selection of his works from the sixties at the Aurelio Stefanini Art Gallery with a catalog presentation by Walter Guadagnini, followed in 2008 by another exhibition of recent works dedicated to cinema, with a catalog presentation by Flaminio Gualdoni, Jean Sellem and Raffaele Simongini. In February/March 2010 the Italian Cultural Institute promoted one of its exhibitions at the Galleria Civica in Bratislava with the publication of a catalog with a presentation by Teresa Triscari. The same exhibition, dedicated to works from the 1960s, is on display between May and June at the Art Gallery of the City of Žilina. Between September and December 2016 Nikita from 1964 is placed among the over 70 works present at the Magnani Rocca Foundation in Mamiano di Traversetolo (PR) for the exhibition. Between March and April 2017, the solo exhibition "Plural Feminine. Works from the Sixties to today" was organized at the gallery, curated by Luca Beatrice, who in the exhibition catalog describes Malquori's career as "an exhaustive atlas, an archive conceived as a work in progress, conceived in numerous chapters that follow the evolution of the image, from black and white to colour". Between April and September 2017 two of his works were exhibited in the collective exhibition entitled “Dai '60s ai '60s. A century after the Unification of Italy, Pop Art", organized at the National Museum of the Italian Risorgimento in Turin and curated by Luca Beatrice and Ferruccio Martinotti. In June 2017, the solo show "From the 60s to today" was dedicated to him inside Palazzo Pegaso in Florence, seat of the Council of the Tuscany Region. From 2 to 5 February 2018 Res Publica - Galleria d'Arte Democratica dedicates an entire stand to him at the 42nd edition of Arte Fiera in Bologna.
