Mario Sasso Biography
Mario Sasso was born in Staffolo, province of Ancona, in December 1934, and soon moved with his family to the nearby city of Jesi. As a boy he frequented the studio of some local painters. At the age of eighteen he went to Turin, where he followed courses at the Armando Testa School of Graphics. In 1958 he moved to Rome where he painted a large cycle of informal paintings. In the early seventies, in the studio in via Oslavia, he painted Spaziclosed - Spacesopen, a cycle of paintings on the theme of urban restlessness, characterized by a strong poetic accent and a pointillist painting removed from photographic enlargement, which Sasso makes explicit reference. In 1980 he held the premiere of his environmental film The awakening of art from death at the Il Ferro di Cavallo bookshop in Rome, which launched the artist's technological experimentation, with a strong reflection on the world of painting. At the same time he designed and created the first three-dimensional theme songs produced in Italy, that of Tg 2 in 1984 and Tg 3 in 1986, with music by Brian Eno. In the same year he created a video on Leonardo's Mona Lisa, painted virtually in paintbox by Picasso, De Chirico, Kandinsky, Pollock, and projected at the Venice Biennale, dedicated to the theme of Art and Science, which subsequently became the theme song of the art column of RaiUno Great Exhibitions. In 1990, together with the architect Mao Benedetto, he designed the electronic obelisk within which the three-dimensional images of the video Le città continua inspired by Le città invisibili by Italo Calvino flow. The nineties are the years of electronic research into video installations. He created The Homage to Dziga Vertov, Bacon's Room, Continuous Cities (Videopostcards), The Homage to Leopardi and the Tower of the Trilogies, a monolith of sixty monitors, seven meters high, on the theme of light, water and color, with music by Nicola Sani, ordered by the company iGuzzini Illuminazione, in which the artist experiments with the vertical montage technique, and with which he wins the Guggenheim prize. The Tower was subsequently exhibited at the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, in the Italian pavilion of Hannover 2000. Sasso was invited to two editions of the Quadrennial in Rome and at the Siggraph in Los Angeles. In 1996 he was invited to the Skironio biennial in Athens with a video installation. In 1999 for Nicola Sani's concert Not all islands have the sea around the Pergolesi Theater in Jesi he created three video installations in which involvement with the public was envisaged. In Ancona in 2002 he created a projection on a large fan of water at the port. The cloud, created with a special hydraulic installation, recalls the images of the works of the great masters of art from the Marche region, to whom the work is dedicated. In 2003 he held an anthological exhibition at the Premio Salvi in Sassoferrato, with installations also in Fabriano and Jesi. In 2005, in Brussels, he created an exhibition in the residence of the Italian Ambassador to the European Union. In 2006 Sasso exhibited together for the first time the cycle Duchamp's Wheel, four videotapes dedicated to Ingres, Bacon, Hopper and the art of the twentieth century, composed in a single installation in Fabriano in the portico of the town square, for the Ermanno Prize Casoli, on the occasion of the exhibition on Gentile da Fabriano. On the same occasion he also created the installation of the Picture Gallery of Portraits. In 2007 he was present with a video installation at the traveling exhibition “Viaggio nell'Arte Italiana 1950 / 80 curated by Maurizio Calvesi, Marisa Vescovo, Lorenzo Canova. In recent years, painting has become predominantly digital and the IT medium contributes to an ever-increasing dematerialisation of images. The globalized metropolis transforms into a galaxy, and the painting becomes an object, taking the form of a cloth and a package. With this production Mario Sasso exhibited in April 2008 at the pH7 gallery in Rome. A solo exhibition curated by Massimo Riposati. In October of the same year, Sasso was ordered to have an anthological exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, organized by GLAZon ART, curated by Annalisa Filoni. The exhibition is documented by a book published by the Volume Foundation, with a text by Victor Misiano. In 2009 Mario Sasso received the Città di Staffolo award where he exhibited the video installation "triptych", curated by Nicoletta Rosetti, in the church of S. Francesco. In September, the Fondazione Città Italia invited him with 12 other artists to an exhibition-event at the Triennale in Milan, where the works were sold at an auction to benefit the blind. In 2010 he was invited to participate with a video installation at the Carrara biennial, curated by Federica Forti. In August of the same year he exhibited some installations on the theme of the city in the Palazzina Azzurra in San Benedetto del Tronto, curated by Giancarlo Bassotti. In 2011 he was invited to the Italian pavilion at the 54th edition of the Venice Biennale with a video installation dedicated to the historical Soviet avant-gardes. An anthological exhibition is being prepared at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome.
