Bruno Starita Biography
Bruno Starita, born in 1933 in Naples, was an Italian painter and engraver, active mainly between the 1950s and the 2000s. In her youth, showing a certain propensity for the violin, Starita showed a rebellious character towards school education. However, due to the arrival of war events, he was forced to abandon his study of the violin. In the post-war period, he developed a great passion for books and printmaking, which would become two of his main artistic interests.
Starita began frequenting the workshop of an elderly lithograph engraver, learning the techniques of printing and chromolithography, and enrolled in the free school of the nude at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples. In 1956, as soon as he graduated, he was appointed as an assistant professor of designed ornamentation at the Art School of Naples. From her first works, Starita stood out for her technical experimentations and her attention to masters such as Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, as well as her love for Giorgio Morandi.
In the 1960s, Starita became interested in photography, which greatly influenced his artistic research as a painter and engraver. He also dedicated himself to experimenting with aquatint, arriving at a wider range of functional material variations and a different relationship between sign and surface. In 1965, he was invited to the sixth edition of the Alexandria Biennial in Egypt, together with Morandi, receiving important recognition for his exhibition activity.
In the second half of the Seventies, Starita devoted himself with renewed attention to painting, which he practiced until the early Eighties. Furthermore, in his engravings, a strong imprint of "mimesis" and concreteness of contents and forms was highlighted. In 1984, he underwent delicate brain surgery, which forced him to move to a smaller laboratory in Naples. However, he soon resumed his exhibition activity, participating in important national projects, such as the illustration of some panels of the Divine Comedy.
Since 2001, Starita was dismissed from his activity as a teacher of engraving techniques due to reaching the age limit, but continued to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples as a teacher of restoration of engraved matrices and engraved prints. He died on November 27, 2010, after approximately eight months of illness.
