Gianni Colombo (1937-1993) - Senza titolo

Gianni Colombo was born in Milan on January 1. He comes from a Milanese entrepreneurial family: his father, Giuseppe Colombo, inherits a textile company and transforms it into a factory of electrical conductors. His mother, Tina Benevolo, plays piano, an instrument also studied by her son, through the teaching of the composer Lucio Lattuada. He has two brothers, Cesare, seven years older (known by the stage name Joe, he entered the history of Italian design as one of the most creative and experimental designers of the sixties) and Sergio, older than both, who died young.
He studies at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, attending painting courses led by Achille Funi and Pompeo Borra, and working first in a studio on Via Montegrappa in Milan, with Davide Boriani and Gabriele De Vecchi, then in a space adjacent to his brother Joe’s studio (from 1958 in Via Foppa, in a room of his father’s factory; from 1961 to 1965 on Viale Piave and from 1965 to 1968 on Via Argelati). In these years he regularly exhibits ceramic works at the Faenza National Ceramic Competition and at the Gubbio National Ceramic Exhibition. He also makes his debut with abstract works, experimenting with different materials and languages, from ceramics to graphics, from photography to cinema, producing, under the influence of Lucio Fontana’s teaching, poly-material works and monochrome reliefs in cotton wool that, in 1959, are shown at the Azimut Gallery in Milan, a gallery to which he collaborates in realization with Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani and Gabriele De Vecchi. In that same year, in Milan, Gianni Colombo co-founds with Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani and Gabriele De Vecchi the Gruppo T (which, from the following year, will include Grazia Varisco), whose collective and individual exhibitions will take the title Miriorama (a thousand images), progressively numbered to emphasize the continuity of a common program that will guide the group’s work for several years, reclaiming themes of the historical avant-gardes (particularly the Futurists, Dadaists, and Constructivists), reinterpreted in light of the latest artistic experiments and research: Fontana’s Spatialism and his Environments, Munari and Tinguely’s Useless Machines, Manzoni’s Lines and Achromes. The group’s aim is to abolish every static border between painting, sculpture, and architecture."