Agenore Fabbri (1911-1998)

Biography

Agenore Fabbri was born in a small town located in the area of Pistoia ; there he was educated, before going to Firenze where he came into contact with a bunch of avant guarde intellectuals such as Eugenio Montale (lately Nobel Prize for Literature) and painter Ottone Rosai at the Caffé Giubbe Rosse.

Then, in 1935, he transfer to Albisola where he developed close friendship with Aligi Sassu, Arturo Martini and Lucio Fontana ; at the beginning of the Post-War period, he started his career with painting on pottery and then in the early fifties he made sculptures on the theme of the dog struggling with the human being, treated in a very expressionist style.

 

In 1948 he moved to Milan and was invited to the Venice Biennale, and then he continued to exhibit diligently until the early sixties as he participated to the Rome Quadrennial in 1951, 1959, 1973. In the meantime he experimented the various materials of Informal Art working with wood, rags, gravel and sand. Since the second half of the sixties, he returned to his expressionist attitudes creating big sculptures in iron and bronze. In 1982, he discovered the painting that would become prominent in the 1980s and 1990s and has won, in the years, worldwide fame.

Agenore Fabbri was always searching for what is new, not yet decided : thus he varied not only themes, but techniques too, always in an expressionist style and never confines himself to a definite form. His works provoke question, are disturbing, destroy the certainties, so reflecting the crisis of the modern society.

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