Umberto Milani (1912 - 1969) attended Adolfo Wildt's lessons at the Brera Academy where he met Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti and Luigi Broggini. His figurative debut opened up a prominent space for him alongside the sculptors active in Milan in those years (1930-1940): Arturo Martini, Marino Marini, Giacomo Manzù. Read the full biography
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Umberto Milani (1912 - 1969) attended Adolfo Wildt's lessons at the Brera Academy where he met Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti and Luigi Broggini. His figurative debut opened up a prominent space for him alongside the sculptors active in Milan in those years (1930-1940): Arturo Martini, Marino Marini, Giacomo Manzù. He later created a series of sculptures, paintings and drawings of a post-cubist tone with Syronian and Romanesque influences. After some passages in which abstract images with robust sinusoidal shapes recur, the informal debut takes place. The first paintings made with the "dripping" technique appeared in 1947; immediately afterwards in plaster casts, bronzes and cements his expressive world is enriched with primordial values, chthonic microcosms of earth and matter that has just emerged from chaos and on which man leaves his first traces. In 1954 and 1957 the wall sculptures for the Milanese Triennials were created, mysterious hieroglyphs and ancestral messages in bas-relief. Thus he began an intense collaboration with some architects working in Milan (L. Baldessarri, C. De Carli, M. Zanuso, I. Parisi, the Castiglione brothers and S. Longhi). In 1958 and 1962 he was present with a personal room at the Venice Biennale, presented by Marco Valsecchi and Franco Russoli. After 1960 he proposed symbolic steles, hieratic verticalities and lanceolate shapes like corroded Longobard "spathes", fossil architecture, poetic finds of geological and natural events.
