Corpora Antonio

Antonio Corpora was born in Tunis to Italian parents on 15 August 1909. After studying at the Tunis School of Art he spent a few years between Florence, Rome, Milan and Tunis, before finally settling in Rome in 1945. In Rome, Antonio Corpora came to Renato Guttuso, who made his studio available to him to work. He is a friend of Gino Severini, Nino Franchina, Giulio Turcato, Pietro Consagra, the young Piero Dorazio and Achille Perilli. From living with Guttuso and from daily discussions the idea of a polemical exhibition was born which is directly linked to the great modern European tradition. In 1946, under the group label "Neo-Cubist", the aforementioned exhibition was held at the "Galleria del Secolo" in Rome, with the participation, as well as Corpora, of Guttuso, Monachesi, Fazzini and Turcato. A large group of Italian painters align themselves with the same ideas as the neo-cubists, thus giving rise to the "New Front of the Arts” of which Corpora is one of the most active supporters. In 1952 the “Group of Eight”, which was formed as a legitimate continuation of the renewing demands of the “New Front of the Arts”, composed of: Afro Basaldella, Renato Birolli, Antonio Corpora, Mattia Moreni, Ennio Morlotti, Giuseppe Santomaso, Giulio Turcato, Emilio Vedova. The Group identified Venturi as the critic who could best present it and, at Corpora's request, agreed to write a brief introduction to a publication that presented the Otto at the Venice Biennale of the same year. Between the end of the 1950s and the 1960s, Corpora began to dialogue with European informality in his works, abandoning any sense of geometric construction; the colors tend to darken, shapes created in overlapping veils, to suggest a sense of depth of the painting which "becomes a deep mirror, without any precise centre, into which the gaze enters interminably, always discovering new rebounds and referrals from one layer to the next". 'other of a color that evokes magical psychological atmospheres', Cesare Vivaldi wrote of him. At the end of the Seventies, his painting acquired a great expressive freedom, which also made use of innovative techniques, such as what the artist calls "mural", and the "dripping” (technique in which the color is left to drip onto the canvas lying on the ground from a container with holes in it or splashed directly with sticks or brushes).. The Eighties represent an era of great creativity, in those years, and in the following ones, Corpora did not he ceased his activity and continued to paint, working in particular on the watercolor technique. In 2003, upon designation by the National Academy of San Luca, the then President of the Republic Ciampi awarded him the National “President of the Republic” Award. After a long career, Antonio Corpora died in 2004, in Rome.