Gianni Colombo - Senza Titolo

Edited serigraphy by the D Milano studio in 100 copies in 1972 - last remaining copy

Gianni Colombo was born in Milan on January 1. He belongs to a family of Milanese entrepreneurs: his father, Giuseppe Colombo, inherited a textile company and transformed it into a factory of electrical conductors. His mother, Tina Benevolo, plays piano, an instrument also studied by his son, through the teaching of composer Lucio Lattuada. He has two brothers, Cesare, seven years older (known by the stage name Joe, who 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 taught 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 one adjacent to his brother Joe’s studio (from 1958 on Via Foppa, in premises 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 debuts with abstract works, experimenting with different materials and languages, from ceramic to graphics, from photography to cinema, creating, under the influence of Lucio Fontana’s teachings, polymaterial works and white-relief pieces in cotton wool that, in 1959, he exhibits at the Azimut Gallery in Milan, a gallery whose creation he collaborates on with Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani and Gabriele De Vecchi. In the same year, in Milan, Gianni Colombo founded with Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani and Gabriele De Vecchi the Gruppo T (which would later include Grazia Varisco from the following year), whose collective and individual exhibitions would be titled Miriorama (a thousand images), progressively numbered to emphasize the continuity of a shared program that would guide the group’s work for several years, reclaiming themes of the historical avant-gardes (in particular the Futurists, Dadaists and Constructivists), reworked in light of the most recent 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 any static border between painting, sculpture, and architecture."