Armando Testa Biography
Armando Testa (1917 - 1992) was born in Turin in 1917 and began working as a printer's apprentice at just fourteen years old, while attending the Vigliardi Paravia Typographic School. In 1937, just twenty years old, he won a national competition announced by the magazine "Graphicus" for the design of a poster for ICI, a company producing printing inks. Testa's proposal, preferred to those of established commercial artists, was a very simple abstract drawing on a black background which clearly reflected his interest in Bauhaus graphics. After the war, where he worked as a photographer, he returned to Turin and resumed his activity as a printer. He opened a small studio and began working for important companies such as Martini & Rossi, Carpano, Borsalino and Pirelli. In 1956 he founded Studio Testa, an advertising agency that does not limit itself to graphics but also produces commercials for television. Armando Testa understood the possibilities of this new medium and accepted the challenge of investing in it, setting up a small film studio next to the agency where he also experimented with cutting-edge animation techniques. In 1965 he was invited to take up the chair of Typographic Design and Composition at the Polytechnic of Turin, where he taught until 1971. Subsequently, in 1968, he received the Gold Medal from the Ministry of Education for his contribution to the Visual Arts, while in 1975 the Italian Advertising Federation awarded him its Gold Medal for his successes abroad. Even today the Testa agency is the most important advertising agency in Italy. In the 1980s Armando Testa was very involved in designing posters and brands for institutions of cultural and social commitment. Among his best-known works from this period are those for Amnesty International, the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto and the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art. Exhibitions dedicated to his pictorial and advertising work have been set up by numerous museums and institutions in Italy and abroad, including the PAC – Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan (1984 and 2010), the Mole Antonelliana in Turin (1985), the Parsons School of Design in New York and Los Angeles (1987 and 1988), the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid (1989), Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (1993), the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (2001) and Institute Italian Culture in London (2004) Sintesi 59, inauguration of public sculpture for the city of Turin (2015), MART - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (2017). His works are also present in some important museum collections, such as the MoMA – Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Communication Study Center and Archive of the University of Parma and still many others. Armando Testa died in Turin in 1992.
