Giorgio Ulivi Biography
Giorgio Ulivi was born in Vicopisano on 28 December 1938. After interrupting his studies, he worked for a few years in various artisan workshops and acquired great manual skills and knowledge of techniques. He resumed his studies in 1964 and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in the painting course held by Primo Conti, an artist with whom he would continue a relationship of friendship and collaboration in future years. He later became interested in the pictorial experiences of the Cobra group. In 1969 he was present at the Rome Quadrennial with abstract-expressionist works. In the seventies, research, a recurring motif in his work, led him to create a series of works on "impossible geometries", all playing on the ambiguity of the construction of space. This work will subsequently allow him to investigate the "Other" paths that arise from the vision of black mirrored planes with perspectives reversed on distorted and jutting planes. This is followed by a series of works on paper where he obtains similar results by dividing the space with parallel bands of colour, routed on divergent tracks. Since the 1980s he has been working on the “structure-colour” value. The meeting with the Cuban poet Carlos Franqui dates back to those years, whose friendship and trust were decisive in the development of his work and which put him in contact with Piero Dorazio. The work of recent years moves away from the surface of the painting to investigate a more articulated and complex space. His painting and his directions leave the perimeters of the canvas and the materials are also changed. No longer canvas and frame but metal, wood, glass enrich his pictorial vocabulary. From 1980 to 1989 he taught painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, subsequently he held the position for a year in Bologna and from 1991 to 2001 he was a professor at the Academy in Florence. He currently lives and works in Pistoia where he dedicates himself completely to his artistic activity. In the last ten years Ulivi has been particularly interested in the collage technique on pages printed by him with silk-screen printing, always giving great importance to the sign, writing and colour. In 2007, in fact, with that technique he created a folder of ten sheets 50 x 70 cm entitled The light petals of painting and the artist's book The tattoos of the soul and presented them in Milan following the project of the curator Alessandra Lucia Curuzzi, “The places unusual elements of art”.
