Hiero Prampolini Biography
Hiero Prampolini was born in Milan in 1913. He made his artistic debut in 1942 with a personal exhibition at the Galleria della Spiga in Milan. He was a member of the "Corrente" group, formed in Milan around the Corrente magazine of youth life, founded by Ernesto Treccani in 1938 and closed by fascism in 1940.
Despite the difficulties, their art found support in the La Bottega di Corrente and Il Milione galleries in Milan, and notable admirers included Alberto della Ragione, who purchased La Bottega di Corrente and renamed it La Spiga, continuing to promote the group and to collect its works. . The Corrente painters, including Treccani, Renato Birolli, Renato Guttuso, Bruno Cassinari, Ennio Morlotti, Giuseppe Migneco, Aligi Sassu, Giuseppe Santomaso, Fiorenzo Tomea, Italo Valenti, and Emilio Vedova, as well as the sculptors Giacomo Manzù, Luigi Broggini, and , more sporadically, Lucio Fontana rejected the archaism and classicism of the twentieth century, as well as the exclusive intellectualism of the avant-garde.
Their research focused on ethically engaged topics, which they approached through a realism deformed by expressionism, allowing them to assert their disagreements. Their new models were the works of Van Gogh, Ensor, Munch, Kokoschka and Kirchner, as well as Picasso's Guernica (1937), which they considered symbols of the tragedy of contemporary events. Some works by Prampolini attest to his participation in Futurism.
Towards the end of the 1950s he moved to Liguria, finding renewed inspiration for his works in the coastal environment. Hiero Prampolini taught at the Liceo Artistico N. Barabino in Genoa from 1964 to 1975. Among his most important exhibitions was his participation in the Promotrice di Belle Arti in Turin in 1961.
