Farewell to Gianfranco Baruchello, leaves us one of Italy's greatest artists

He passed away tonight in Rome, at the age of 98, one of Italy’s leading artists, Gianfranco Baruchello. Born in Livorno on August 24, 1924, he was best known for his conceptual art works and for his intense participation in the Italian art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, although his production continued undaunted until recent years. He was also known as the artist of “minuscule drawings,” sheets made with black, schematic strokes, and for being one of the leading exponents of “extra-media” art, according to scholar Enrico Crispolti’s definition to indicate an art that makes use of a wide variety of means, even unusual ones (even land purchases), to overturn the conventions of art itself.

After graduating with a degree in economics, he began working in the chemical industry in 1947, and then finally abandoned his career in 1959 in order to devote himself entirely to art. Baruchello first began as a painter: however, he soon realized that painting was not enough to express his ideas and gradually devoted himself to conceptual art, though without ever abandoning painting. With this art form, Baruchello sought to express abstract concepts through the use of signs and symbols. He trained between Paris and New York, a city where he met artists such as Roberto Matta, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, and approached Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. In 1962 he participated in the nouveau réalistes exhibition organized by Pierre Restany at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, and in 1963 he exhibited at his first solo show organized by Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome.

He later exhibited at the Venice Biennale (in 1976 and 1982), while his first anthological exhibition was in 1982 (at the Progressive Museum of Modern Art in Livorno). Alongside his artistic production it is possible to mention the publication of books and the making of videos and films, including The Uncertain Verification of 1964-1965, a kind of cinematic ready-made , and then again Forced to Disappear of 1968 and Norms for Holocausts of 1969. Among his most interesting actions is the opening of the company Agricola Cornelia in 1973, for which Baruchello bought a piece of land on the outskirts of Rome: the company itself became a great work of art that spoke of the value of work, the economy, and the products of the earth, and the experience resulted in an exhibition, Agricola Cornelia s.p.a. 1973-1981 held in Milan.

Instead, the birth of the Baruchello Foundation in his former home-studio dates back to 1998, while the major anthological exhibition Certe idee curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and hosted at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome dates from 2011-2012.

Farewell to Gianfranco Baruchello, leaves us one of Italy's greatest artists

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