Ettore Spalletti Biography
Ettore Spalletti (Cappelle sul Tavo, 1940) is an Italian sculptor and painter, who still lives and works in his hometown: he is an internationally renowned artist. Italian painter and sculptor (born in Cappelle sul Tavo, Pescara, 1940). Since the mid-Seventies, Spalletti has dedicated himself to research aimed at enhancing the emotional prominence of the chromatic tone, investigated both in painting and in sculpture, developing wooden and marble structures of essential shapes, from whose apparent monochrome a pictorial manual skill shines through. of overlapping and abraded layers, a color imbued with matter and light, in harmonious interrelation with the surrounding space. Spalletti's artistic practice is identified with an entirely manual process of surface processing (the wooden support of the painting, but also the marble of the sculpture), treated with multiple layers of pigments. The pictorial surface is placed in relationship with the exhibition environment in a physical sense, to the point of renouncing its own integrity through the tapering of the edges or the overhang of the support surface, going beyond the boundary between painting and sculpture. The sculptural work presents itself as a form strongly synthesized in a geometric sense and often alludes to recognizable images (column, vase, cup, which are considered archetypes of the language of sculpture). In 1996 he created permanent installations of particular emotional intensity for the Hôpital Poincaré in Garches. His works have been presented at Documenta in Kassel (1982, 1992), at the Venice Biennale (1982, 1993, 1995, 1997) and in personal exhibitions in Paris (Musée d'art moderni de la Ville de Paris, 1991), New York (Osmosis, SR Guggenheim Museum, 1993, with Haim Steinbach), Antwerp (Museum van Hedendaages Kunst, 1995), Strasbourg (Salle des fêtes, Musée d'art moderni et contemporain, 1998-99), Naples (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, 1999), Leeds (Henry MooreFoundation, 2005). In 2014 the most complete retrospective of the artist's work, entitled A day so white, so white, was set up in a museum circuit made up of the MAXXI in Rome, the GAM in Turin and the Madre Museum in Naples. In 2017, he was awarded an honorary degree in architecture from the Gabriele D'Annunzio University of Pescara.
