"Untitled" by Giovanni Cappelli.

Technique: lithograph

Dimensions: 85 x 67
Year: 1990
Print number: 72/120
Dry stamp "Edizioni Torcular"
Elegantly framed work

Born in Cesena, Italy in 1923, Giovanni Cappelli enrolled at the Art School of Bologna at the age of seventeen and continued his training with courses held by Virgilio Guidi at the Academy of Fine Arts in the same city.

The subjects of his early works are figures and settings of peasant life, laborers and seafarers, with inevitable digressions into the celebration of the resistance. In 1956 he was invited to the Venice Biennale chaired by Roberto Longhi. In 1959 he moved to Milan and his painting, having moved away from the strict observance of his earlier realism, presented new formal syntheses portraying the condition of a degraded and marginalized humanity set in poor interior surroundings or in the gloomy and oppressive Milanese suburbs - complete with existentialist accents taken from literary authors such as Sartre, Camus, Beckett and Pavese.

From the seventies these tensions dissolved with the reappearance of color in a path that has been defined as the artist moving “from darkness to light” (Dino Formaggio). Cappelli's later years were spent in the Fornico rest home on Lake Garda. Cappelli exhibited at the Quadriennale in Rome (1963) and in various locations in Romagna; is career was mapped by critics such as Marco Valsecchi, Mario De Micheli and Raffaele Carrieri; he held his most important solo exhibition at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara (1989).