Turi Sottile Biography
Turi Sottile was born on 21 February 1934 in Acireale. He learned the first rudiments of art around the age of nine in the workshop of the painter Giuseppe Bella Vasta, of impressionist extraction, who introduced him to figurative painting. He attended classical studies and began to study the great masters of the past: above all Matisse, Picasso, Delacroix and then Mondrian, De Kooning, Hartung, and Twombly, from whom he drew inspiration for his future as an artist. Around the 1950s he became interested, more for fun than out of real conviction, in conceptual art, building those objects that Vincenzo De Maria, an art critic from Catania, defined as "emotional art". In his studio in Acireale, in fact, he works on various simulated situations. After a few years, works of a performative nature will make the fortune of many. “In my life as an artist, a strange sense of timing haunts me: I always arrive two years early,” says Sottile. From '52 he dedicated himself exclusively to painting, starting to participate in various collective exhibitions. His first personal exhibition took place in Messina in '58. Around the sixties he entered the current of new figuration. Since 1967 he has promoted and directed the International Art Exhibition for eighteen years, making Acireale a lively center of cultural interest and, from there, the great journey of knowledge begins, also through great travels. In the '79s - '80s he went for a short stay to Russia, where he visited the most important schools for the construction of icons. Then working in an artisan workshop, he learned the technique for working with icons. Back in Italy he painted the "captured images", for which the critic Italo Mussa, presenting him in Genoa at the Forma Gallery, coined the term "snippets extrapolated from Cultured Painting", a term which would then determine the current of "Cultivated Painting". ”, theorized by Mussa himself. Then, at intervals, he travels to Tanzania, Kenya, Venezuela, Uruguay, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, but also to China, Japan, Australia, to return first to North America, Canada and the United States, and then again in South America, in Argentina, where he spent long periods, exhibiting in various personal exhibitions and holding conferences and courses on contemporary European painting in various schools and universities.
