Ennio Morlotti (1910-1992) - Bosco

11-color lithograph on paper - Work signed by hand in the lower right corner and numbered in the lower left corner - 50x70 cm - year 1991 - Limited edition - copy to be shipped with certificate of guarantee XI/L - unframed - excellent condition - private collection - purchase and provenance Italy - shipment via UPS - SDA - DHL - TNT - BRT.
Biography
Ennio Morlotti, one of the main protagonists of the Italian and European art scene of the second half of the 20th century, was born in Lecco, on Lake Como, on September 21, 1910, in a family where the father was a war invalid and the mother was a teacher.
After a schooling in a college boarding school, where he excelled academically, in 1923 he began working as an accountant in an oil mill, then until 1936 as a clerk in a paint factory and as a worker in a mechanical factory.
Despite the hard living conditions of those years, he devoted himself to studying ancient art in churches and museums, also taking an interest in contemporary art, until he obtained artistic maturity as a private candidate at Brera.
Having left the factory job, he moved to Florence and enrolled in the Academy, where, under the guidance of Felice Carena, he graduated with a thesis on Giotto, achieving the top marks.
In 1937, thanks to the earnings from the sale of three paintings exhibited for a competition for the Lecco landscape, he made a trip to Paris where he saw the original works of his beloved Cézanne and Picasso.
In 1940 he joined the Corrente group, which drew inspiration from the student magazine "Corrente di vita giovanile", directed by Ernesto Treccani, following its French Expressionist orientation, from Van Gogh to the Fauves.
In 1945 he married Anna and the following year he joined the Communist Party, to which he adhered for six months; this was a difficult year economically but fruitful culturally, as he signed the Manifesto of Realism, joined the New Front of Arts and held his first solo show at the II Camino Gallery in Milan. In that year, thanks to a scholarship obtained from Lionello Venturi, he could have resided in Paris for two years with Renato Birolli, but after two months he returned to Milan because he could not paint; nevertheless, he had visited Picasso’s studio, met Braque, Dominguez, De Staël, Sartre and Camus.
It was after the 24th Venice Biennale (1948), where he exhibited with all the artists of the New Front of the Arts, that Morlotti’s position was defined, as he, together with Birolli, broke away from the “realist” members of the group.
It was precisely in the 1950s that he produced some of the capital works of informal art, not only Italian but also European, surely linked to the experiences of authors such as Wols, Fautrier, De Staël, but also Pollock and De Kooning.
The Biennale hosted his works many times, in 1950, in 1952 together with the Group of Eight, in 1954 with a room presented by Giovanni Testori (the works were destroyed immediately after), in 1962 winning the prize (tie) reserved for an Italian artist, in 1964 within the section "Art of today in museums", in 1972 with a solo room, in 1988 with another solo show in the pavilion dedicated to Italy and in the section dedicated to the review "The New Front of the Arts at the 1948 Biennale".
In 1986 and 1992 he was invited to the National Quadriennale of Art in Rome.
The most important overall exhibitions of the last decade are those of 1987 in Locarno and Milan, and 1994 in Ferrara, held posthumously after his death on December 15, 1992 in Milan.