Fabrizio Clerici (1913-1993) - Cammelli

Lithography on two-color paper - Hand-signed work at the bottom right and numbered at the bottom left - 50x70 cm - year 1977 - Limited edition - copy to be shipped with certificate of guarantee 34/70 - unframed - excellent condition - private collection - purchase and provenance Italy - shipping via UPS - SDA - DHL - BRT - TNT.
Biography
Fabrizio Clerici was born in Milan in 1913 where he spent the early years of his life.
In 1920 he moved with his family to Rome, where he graduated in 1937 from the Superior School of Architecture. In the thirties Clerici often stayed in Milan, where he formed important connections with the cultural milieu and, in particular, with Giorgio de Chirico. His stay in Rome during his youth was decisive: Roman monuments, Renaissance and Baroque painting and architecture strongly influenced him, as did the Catholic religious rites he attended over time. In Rome, as a university student, he attended Le Corbusier’s lectures and in 1936 he befriended Alberto Savinio. Between the two artists a deep mutual esteem emerged; in Listen to Your Heart, City (1944) Savinio writes: “Fabrizio, after all, is so naturally Stendhalian, in spirit, in character, in habit that, for once, I am allowed to believe that nature has done things rightly.” In 1938, in Milan, he met Giorgio de Chirico with whom he engaged in long conversations about painting techniques, particularly egg tempera. After a period in Milan, at the end of World War II he returned to Rome and drew near to the scientific studies of Athanasius Kircher, to the anamorphic works of Erhard Schön, and to the optical-prospetic theories of Father Jean-François Niceron, Mathematician of the Minim order. Leonor Fini and Fabrizio Clerici met for the first time, fleetingly, in Paris, at the end of the thirties, at the Galerie Jacques Bonjean, founded by their common friend Christian Dior. Dior and Leonor Fini had been introduced to Clerici by Jacques-Paul Bonjean himself. Fini and Clerici later met again in Milan and finally in Rome, in 1943, forming an important friendship that would last throughout their lives. The magical atmosphere marking the meeting with Leonor Fini is recounted by Clerici in a 1945 article published in “Quadrante.” During the second half of the Forties he frequented artists and writers of the Roman intellectual environment. In January 1945 he exhibited in Rome, with Savinio, Leonor Fini, Stanislao Lepri and other artists in a group show presented by Mario Praz, and also in New York at the Julien Levy Gallery with Alberto Viviani. The following year he met Tristan Tzara in Milan. In September 1948, in Venice, he befriended Salvador Dalí. From 1949 Clerici began his painting activity: the canvases depict vast compositions in which the artist often uses architectural drawing to create imaginary and dreamlike structures that will characterize his entire work. In 1953 he began a series of journeys to the Middle East. The first stop is Egypt and subsequently his travels took him to Syria, Jordan, Libya, Cyrenaica and Turkey. The journeys to the Middle East inspired him with two themes with which he would wrestle for a long time: Mirages and the Temples of the Egg. In 1955 he presented most of the paintings made in those years at the Sagittarius Gallery in New York. Alongside painting, which evolved in an ever more fantastical and magical direction, he devoted himself to theater. Upon returning from Egypt, Giorgio Strehler invited him to create the sets for Carlo Goldoni’s The Clever Widow. Earlier he had already worked for theater, ballet, and opera, in productions where the most vivid and congenial theme was that of the fantastical world. In 1964 he began a series of plates for Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, a work that kept him occupied for a long period. In 1977 three important retrospectives were dedicated to him in Kiev (Museum of Western Art), Alma Ata (Museum of Fine Arts), and Moscow (Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts), and in 1983 an important exhibition opened at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna – Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara with a catalog preface by Federico Zeri. In 1987 another retrospective opened at the Palace of Caserta with a catalog published by Franco Maria Ricci. From 1988 to 1990 he prepared the great retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome (1990) in which more than two hundred works from public and private collections are featured. After his passing, occurred in Rome in 1993, the Fabrizio Clerici Archive was established, today organized as a cultural association with headquarters in Palazzo Brancaccio in Rome.