Gaetano Pompa Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Gaetano Pompa (1933-1998) was born in Forenza, Basilicata in 1933. After leaving Lucania, he spent his childhood in Tarquinia where his father was a school teacher. Read the full biography

Gaetano Pompa Biography

Gaetano Pompa (1933-1998) was born in Forenza, Basilicata in 1933. After leaving Lucania, he spent his childhood in Tarquinia where his father was a school teacher. After the Second World War he moved with his family to Rome where he studied and dedicated himself to painting and engraving. Here he exhibited in numerous galleries, in 1957 at the Galleria L'Obelisco, where he met Calder and Burri and became friends with Rotella and Buggiani.

From 1958 to 1961 he lived in Munich, where he also developed an intense artistic activity as a musician. Returning to Italy, he spent most of his life in Rome. Here in 1964 an exhibition presented at the Obelisk was revived in New York at the Knoedler Gallery and the following year he was invited to the VI Paris Biennial. He successfully dedicated himself to painting on ceramics and became interested in theatre, creating costumes and scenes for the productions of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo. In 1995, a large anthology of his works was organized at Palazzo Piccolomini in Pienza: paintings, bronzes, majolica and engravings. He died in Orbetello in 1998.

In all his works, the artist has tried to revive the poetry of the past through his airy and distant landscapes and his ambiguous and sometimes paradoxical figures, creating a series of suggestions that overlap with the insistence of memories, mixing past and present with vision.