Giuliano Barbanti - Senza titolo

Giuliano Barbanti (1936 - 2022) was born in Sesto San Giovanni in 1936. At the age of fourteen, he enrolled in the Federico Faruffini School of Art in Sesto San Giovanni. In 1952 he began working as an advertising graphic designer and, concurrently, pursued studies in art and started visiting art galleries and artists' studios. In 1961, with a group of young artists, he opened the gallery “Il Giorno” and in 1962 he opened a studio in the Quartiere delle Botteghe, still in Sesto San Giovanni, where Bonalumi, Castellani, Festa, and Forgioli were already operating. His first solo show took place in 1966 at the Ricerca Cultural Center in Sesto. It is important to place Giuliano Barbanti’s early artistic efforts in the vibrant, vital context of Italian art in the 1950s and 1960s. The art market and exhibitions were concentrated in Milan, Rome, Venice, and Turin, which also played a significant role in aesthetic discussion. Galleries were connected to international circuits. The pace at which exhibitions were organized was frenetic, and Giuliano Barbanti was particularly moved by Mondrian’s exhibition held at Palazzo Reale in Milan. In response to an informal debut in which color and form entered a two-dimensional space without perspective, from the mid-1960s Barbanti began to incorporate into his works a modular dimension segmented by rigid fields. The essential, almost exclusive use of the airbrush is fundamental in the artist’s creative process. The few modifications to the canvas are what keep the borders of the painting in play. Giuliano Barbanti participated in numerous group shows; in 1976 he was invited to the Venice Biennale; one of his works is housed at the Italian Museum of Contemporary Art in Durazzo and one is held at the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art in Dallas. From 1980 to 2017 he was the director of the Civica Scuola d’Arte Federico Faruffini in Sesto San Giovanni.