PAOLO SERRA (Italian) (born 1946)
Light and Space”
Egg Tempera on Gesso Panel
5 7/8” x 5 7/8” (150 x 150mm)
From the “Light & Space” series 1972. Bears original label IMAGE
Paolo Serra was born in 1946 in Morciano
di Romagna. His father was a shoe
designer. In 1955 the family moved to
England where they settled in Northampton and where they stayed for 27
years. From a very early age he began to
learn about Italian Art, particularly that of the Trecento and he was very
interested in the Galleries and Museums.
An exhibition of work by Picasso at the Tate Gallery in 1960 and an
exhibition of contemporary European art in Northampton in 1961 made a great
impression on him. In 1962 he had his
first solo show at the Century Gallery in Northampton while he was just 15
years old which was a huge success and for which the Guardian newspaper wrote
an extensive review. He later won a
number of Arts Council of Great Britain grants and they purchased one of his
works. After exhibiting in several group
shows he decided to focus on materials such as Plexiglass producing assemblages
and artefacts which he called “constructions”.
Towards the end of the 1960s he became interested again in the Old
Master paintings and paid frequent visits to the National Gallery in London. He then discovered Cennino
Cennini’s fundamental treatise, Il libro dell’arte, the art of the
Trecento and Quattrocoenta becoming a fixed point of
reference for him. He began to exhibit
again in the early 1970s and had one-man shows throughout Europe including
London, Amsterdam and Paris where he participated at the Salon Des Realites Nouvelles.
When he was 27 he exhibited a work entitled “Light and Shade” at the
English Pavilion of the 12th Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil. During this time he was painting mainly in
egg tempera producing works with a spatial and perspectival organization of
Renaissance derivation which, together with the Nordic abstraction of Mondrian
and Malevich, became attuned to the minimalist North American artists who were
principally concerned with surface values.
From 1975 to the early 1980s he had a number of solo shows in England
and Holland. In 1976 he produced a 24
square metre fresco for the chapel at All Saints
Middle School in Northampton. Also in
1976 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam purchased one
of his works after he had taken part in a group show they had organized. Numerous other museums, institutions and
foundations also purchased his work including the Nuffield Foundation; the
Milton Keynes Development Corporation, the East Midlands Arts Association, the
Rembrandt Society, the National Bank of the Netherlands, the Amro Bank in Holland, the National Versicherungen
and UBS in Switzerland, the French-German Banquiers
Dreyfus & Cie, Sammlung
Biedermann and the Museum der Stadt Waiblingen in Germany.
In 1982 he returned to Italy where he settled in the hills near
Rimini. Once back in Italy he then moved
in a radical new direction, towards an “essentialism” that aimed to “do away
with any spurious accident that might upset the clear-cut geometric tension of
forms and their super-smooth surfaces”.
This work attracted the attention of Italian critics and galleries and a
number of major European galleries. He
continually received invitations to exhibit at prestigious European art fairs
such as the FIAC in Paris, Art Cologne and Arte Basel. He was invited to the Anni 90 Exhibition in
Bologna by Renato Barilli who later introduced him in the catalogue
for a one-man show at the Galerie Pudelko in
Bonn. A show of Serra’s work at the
Galerie Triebold in Basel was curated by Francis
Naumann in 1994. He has also had a
number of solo shows at galleries in Sweden and Germany. In October 2007 Ronchini Arte
Contemporenea, in collaboration with the Town of Narni and under the patronage of the Province of Terni,
presented Paolo Sierra’s personal exhibition which was held in the Albornoz Fortress in Narni.
During the exhibition, an event was organized to present the book “Paolo Serra Opere 1961 – 2007”, published by Gli
Ori - Editori Contemporanei,
with texts from the art critics Kenneth Baker, Achille Bonito Oliva, Francis
Neumann and Alexandra Henze Triebold,
which covered the entire works of the artist from the very first to the very
last. The publication is illustrated by a large number of photographs of his
works and of the art galleries that hosted the artist's many exhibitions.
Achille Bonito Oliva, in one of his texts, writes – “in Paolo Serra's work we
see a stratification formed by the moral figures of Mondrian, Malevic, Albers, Reinhardt, Newman and Rothko being the
ancestors who monitor the evolution of abstract language right through to the
beginning of the 21st Century. In his iconography he welcomes the atmosphere of
Zen philosophy that can reconcile project and causality, geometry and indetermination, shape and matter.”
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