Matthew Spender Biography
Matthew Spender was born in London in 1945 and studied modern history at Oxford University, later approaching the study of art at the Slade School of Art in London. In 1967 he married Maro Gorki, daughter of the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorki, and with her he moved to Italy in 1968, both choosing to go and live in a charming farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside of Chianti, in the province of Siena, where they continue both to carry out their respective artistic activity. Spender was first interested in painting and carried out considerable exhibition activity in parallel, with personal exhibitions in Italy, Germany and France, arriving in 1989 to be hosted in the prestigious Berkeley Square Gallery in London. In Italy, this period of critical and public success reached its peak with the Michetti Prize for painting, awarded to him in 1991 in Francavilla al Mare. Starting from that year, however, Spender began to turn his attention to sculpture, focusing on natural materials, such as wood, marble and terracotta. It found immediate favor with many collectors, among whom the names of the painter Francis Bacon and the director Bernardo Bertolucci stand out in particular, who chose forty-seven terracotta sculptures by the artist, created in the early nineties, for the film I Dance alone in 1996. Among his main personal exhibitions, the exhibition Il giro di Carrara in eightty days held in 2000 inside the Chiesa del Suffragio of Carrara and the complete retrospective of his sculptures which was held in 2001 in Medieval Museum of Sant'Agostino in Genoa. Important more recent solo exhibitions worth mentioning are also La sacrality nel quotidian, held in Fiesole in 2006; the exhibition at the Futuro Presente Festival in Rovereto in May 2007, at the invitation of Bernardo Bertolucci; and Archeologia del presente of 2008, hosted in the Sale Viscontee and in the evocative courtyards of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. As a writer, he published the book In Toscana. Considerations by an English artist on the art, habits, customs and oddities of the Italians among whom he lives, in the original edition in London by Penguin in 1992 and in Italian translation by Elvira Lato at Barbès in Florence in 2008. Among the awards obtained, he received the position of Full Professor in the painting class of the Academy of Fine Arts of Drawing in Florence and the title of Honorary Professor of the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara, in the sculpture class.
