Riccardo Schweizer Biography
Riccardo Schweizer, born Riccardo Antonio Svaizer (Mezzano, 31 August 1925 – Casez, 20 September 2004), was an Italian painter, sculptor, photographer, designer and architect. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, teaching painting there from 1954 to 1960 as assistant to Bruno Saetti. He lived in those years in the house of the painter Vittorio Basaglia, who would be the stimulus and comparison for his work in that period. He frequents the city's cultural avant-garde circles very assiduously and has the opportunity to meet, among others, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Gino Marinuzzi, Igor Fëdorovič Stravinskij, Salvatore Quasimodo, Vittorio Klauser, Francesco Tentori, Virgilio Guidi, Diego Valeri, Rodolfo Pallucchini, Giuseppe Marchiori, Giuseppe Mazzariol, Elio Vittorini, Peggy Guggenheim, Guido Cadorin, Guido Perocco, Alberto Viani, Filippo de Pisis, Felice Carena, Gastone Breddo, Umberto Volante and Carmelo Zotti, who will take his place at the Academy in 1960. In 1950 he was in France, in Vallauris on the French Riviera, where he met and frequented Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Massimo Campigli and Le Corbusier. In 1958, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of its foundation, the Picasso Museum in Antibes dedicated an important solo exhibition to him together with his artist friend Davide Orler. In 1960 he settled on the French Riviera and worked as a ceramist. The first large mural works date back to the following year, for the Italian Publishing Institute in Milan and for two hotels in San Martino di Castrozza. In 1963 he married Dina Raveane. From the marriage Monica and Barbara will be born. With the ceramic panel designed for the new Levico spa (1965) he inaugurated the link with Ceramica Pagnossin, a Treviso industry with which he collaborated from 1970 to 1977, creating important applied art objects. In 1966 he dedicated an important work in Ponte nelle Alpi to the Vajont disaster. One of his largest interior decoration interventions dates back to 1978 at the Da Silvio restaurant in San Michele all'Adige, which later became a rare example of a protected restaurant among the Trentino cultural heritage. In the same years he created frescoes, projects and decorative cycles, design objects and interior decorations for public and private buildings, in Italy and France, including the important decoration project of 1982 for the Palazzo dei Festival and the Cannes Congresses. As a designer he won the Murano First Prize in 1986. In 1989 he returned to Venice for a large solo exhibition at the Church of San Stae, on the occasion of which the Electa publishing house dedicated a rich monographic catalog to him edited by Luigi Lambertini. In the nineties he conceived and created numerous works on public and private commissions. Awarded motu proprio by Carlo Azeglio Ciampi with the title of Knight of the Italian Republic in 2001, he worked between Cannes and Casez, in Val di Non, where he died in September 2004.
