Fabio Mauri Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

FABIO MAURI (1926 - 2009) Fabio Mauri is one of the masters of the Italian avant-garde after the Second World War. He lived between Bologna and Milan until 1957, then moved to Rome. Read the full biography

Fabio Mauri Biography

FABIO MAURI (1926 - 2009) Fabio Mauri is one of the masters of the Italian avant-garde after the Second World War. He lived between Bologna and Milan until 1957, then moved to Rome. In 1942 he founded the magazine Il Setaccio with Pier Paolo Pasolini. He taught Aesthetics of Experimentation at the Academy of Fine Arts in L'Aquila for 20 years. He was invited to the Venice Biennale in 1954, 1974, 1978, 1993, 2003, 2013, 2015 and in 2012 to dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel. Mauri's first solo exhibition in 1955 at the Galleria Aureliana in Rome was presented by his friend Pasolini. At the end of '57 he created the first "Schermi", his version of monochrome: the search for zeroing that engaged all the most advanced artists at that time. But Mauri's monochrome already contains the discussion on cinema. The screen is the new true "symbolic form" of the world and Mauri captures this fact promptly, immediately. The mental form of the screen will run through all of Mauri's work. In 1964 he began to reflect on the specificity of European culture and identified it in ideology. “I rethought my biography and thought that I had experienced a strong historical reality, the war. I had removed all this pain like a great accident, I faced it again,” says the artist. The performances of the 1970s were born here: Che cosa è il fascismo, Ebrea, Gran Serata Futurista 1909 – 1939. Fiction is a further means of complicity with the spectators with the aim of recreating a network of sensations between action and public. The step from painting to action is inevitable. The idea escapes from the confines of the canvas, through acts of a past not yet disposed of, and forever intolerable. The two performances of 1971 are emblematic, Ebrea and Che cosa è il fascismo, the latter was born in Rome and then moved to Venice (1974), New York (1979), Prato (1993) and Klagenfurt (1997). His first retrospective dates back to 1994 at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Rome), followed by a second in 1997, at the Kunsthalle in Klagenfurt and a third, in 2003, at Le Fresnoy (Lille). In 1968 with Balestrini, Sanguineti, Eco, Porta, Barilli, Filippini, Arbasino, Colombo, Manganelli, Giuliani, Costa, Celli, Guglielmi, Pagliarani, Mauri was among the founders of the magazine "Quedici". In the 1970s Mauri's work focused on ideology as the subject/object of expressive acts. A critical-ideological analysis of languages: the text of the performance Che cosa è il fascismo (1971, Edizioni Krachmalnicoff) was born, followed by the artist's books Linguaggio è Guerra (1975, Marani Editore), and Manipolazione di cultura (1976, La New Sheet). In the same year he founded the art magazine “La Città di Riga” with Alberto Boatto, Maurizio Calvesi, Jannis Kounellis, Umberto Silva. Fabio Mauri interweaves the dimension of performance with the space of history. The use of the body as a screen in The Gospel by/about Pier Paolo Pasolini, at the Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna, remains unforgettable. And even more central is Che cos'è il fascismo, an extraordinary performance presented in the Safa Palatino establishments in Rome in 1971, coinciding with a moment of serious political tension. By Mauri we can enumerate important themes, formalized as works: the Screen, the Prototypes, the Projections, Photography as Painting, the substantial Identity of Expressive Structures, the indelible relationship between Thought and World and between Thought as World. Mauri's work, as complex as a historical essay, becomes an autobiography, unitary in its development and multiple in its attention to the contemporary world: an analysis coexisted between individual destiny and history. In 2009, the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano appointed him Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, and on 20 May of the same year, having learned the news of Fabio Mauri's passing, Napolitano sent a message of sympathy to the family's pain in which it is underlined that "the intense activity of artistic creation developed by Fabio Mauri in the name of uninterrupted research and openness to the new, and his commitment in the field of cultural organization (...) had made him an important figure in the panorama of Italian art and culture".