Fausto Melotti (Rovereto, 8 June 1901 – Milan, 22 June 1986) was an Italian sculptor, painter and musician.
He was born in Rovereto when it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and attended the Elizabethan Royal School in the city. After the outbreak of the First World War he moved to Florence, where he completed high school. Read the full biography
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Fausto Melotti (Rovereto, 8 June 1901 – Milan, 22 June 1986) was an Italian sculptor, painter and musician.
He was born in Rovereto when it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and attended the Elizabethan Royal School in the city. After the outbreak of the First World War he moved to Florence, where he completed high school. In the Tuscan city of Melotti, with natural expressiveness and apparent manual skill, he comes into contact with avant-garde writers and artists and has the opportunity to closely observe the works of artists of the Florentine Renaissance, such as Giotto, Simone Martini, Sandro Botticelli, Donatello and Michelangelo Buonarroti.
After the conflict, the relationship with the homeland was re-established, which was greatly affected by the warm cultural landscape that had animated Rovereto in those years. He participated in the futurist artist Fortunato Depero, in the architect Gino Pollini (one of the founders of Italian rationalism, thanks to Gruppo 7), in the composer Riccardo Zandonai, and above all in his favorite nephew, the famous pianist Maurizio Pollini, who encouraged The carreer. He then graduated in Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic of Milan. After studying various musical genres, he decided to dedicate himself to sculpture, so he first went to Turin to study in Pietro Canonica's studio, then, from 1928, he moved to Milan under the direction of the great Milanese sculptor to enter Bray Shooting Academy . Adolf Wirth. For a while he was also interested in commercial ceramics and worked with his friend Gio Ponti at Richard-Ginori.
His style has changed over the years, always following his personal research aimed at expressing space in terms of rhythms with a musical flavour; as well as his more traditional sculptures linked to the twentieth century, such as in the V Triennale of 1933. The plaster works exhibited in Milan, or the sculptures prepared for the Europa Universalis in Rome in 1941, between Rome and Carrara, are full of the poetry of his particular predilection for the subject. Thus his link with the twentieth century is evident, with metaphysical art, but above all with rationalism, and with the artists around the Il Milione gallery in Milan, in particular Lucio Fontana. A special bond links Fausto Melotti to Italo Calvino, who wrote that he was inspired by his thin and light sculptures, full of white spaces, to write his masterpiece: The Invisible City. His sculptures will be increasingly spiritual, and at the same time there will be a synthesis in the way and the material: ceramic or plaster, multi-material theatre, but above all his light steel sculptures will be full of veins of surrealism and irony; It was only in 1967, thanks to an exhibition in Milan, that the extreme consequences in the work after official recognition did not manifest themselves.
He also taught and directed the Liceo Artistico di Cantù, now the Liceo Nazionale Artistico Fausto Melotti.
