Graziano Pompili Biography
Graziano Pompili was born in Fiume, Istria. He soon moved with his family to Faenza, a city known for its ancient traditions of ceramic production, where he grew up near a clay quarry; It was precisely the quarry that was at the origin of his destiny as a sculptor, first as a tool for play and then following the carts loaded with clay on the way to the ceramic workshops of Faenza. Graziano Pompili studied at the State Institute of Art for Ceramics, where his teachers were Anselmo Bucci, Giuseppe Liverani, Angelo Biancini and Carlo Zauli. This is then followed by an experience in the artisan workshops of Gaeta and Zannoni. In the 1960s, at the age of twenty, Pompili began his artistic activity, favoring the use of ceramics. In the meantime he moved to Reggio Emilia, where he began his teaching career at the Gaetano Chierici Art Institute, a path which he then continued by attending the Sculpture course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, with teachers Mastroianni and Ghermandi. It was in these early Seventies that Graziano Pompili began to frequent the Versilian workshops, in Carrara at the Studio Nicoli for marble sculpture and in Pietrasanta at the Tommasi (later Del Chiaro) foundry for bronze. Also in the Seventies, the sculptor's exhibition activity began, which was divided between personal exhibitions, collective exhibitions and monumental works. Many works are today found in the permanent collections of contemporary art museums in Italy and around the world. Soon Pompili also began teaching: first the art of ceramics at the Gaetano Chierici Art Institute in Reggio Emilia and subsequently marble sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and sculpture as sacred art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera in Milan.
