Giovanni Omiccioli (1901-975) - La riva del mare

Giovanni Omiccioli (Rome, February 25, 1901 – Rome, March 1, 1975), The shore of the sea, oil on primed cardboard, the sole work measures 50x35 cm. Maritime landscape of great refinement and excellent descriptive and chromatic synthesis.

Giovanni Omiccioli (Rome, February 25, 1901 – Rome, March 1, 1975) was one of the representatives of the so-called Roman School, an artist among the most popular and loved, especially by the "people of the street" traditionally belonging to the Roman territory also due to his dynamic depictions of "soccer matches", he became the symbolic painter of Via Margutta.

After joining the Roman School, in 1928, he formed close ties with Mafai and Antonietta Raphaël, often collaborating also with Scipione and Raffaele Frumenti. His painting activity began in 1934; a few years later, in 1937, he presented three works at the IV Exhibition of the Fascist Union of Fine Arts. From the same year is his first solo show at the Apollo Gallery in Rome.

He frequented the Osteria Fratelli Menghi, a well-known meeting place for painters, filmmakers, screenwriters, writers and poets between the 1940s and 1970s, and he was politically active as well and, with Mario Mafai, Guttuso and Afro, produced the first issue of L'Unità in 1945, immediately after the Liberation. In the same year he participated in the First Exhibition of Art Against Barbarities, promoted by the communist daily at the Gallery of Rome and presented in the catalog by Antonello Trombadori, with a work of strong political engagement (La fucilazione di Bruno Buozzi).

Winner of an edition of the Marzotto Prize with The Shepherd with the goat, Omiccioli appeared in the most important exhibitions: of particular note is the invitation with an anthology to the Hermitage in Leningrad, the solo show at the La Medusa Gallery in Naples; during the fifties he participated in group shows in Pittsburgh, Boston, Tokyo, exhibited at the itinerant show in the Nordic countries organized by the Art Club, at the Roman Quadriennales of 1955, 1959 and then 1966, at the Venetian Biennales of 1952, 1954, 1956. In 1959 he presented a painting on faesite, Christ crucified, at the VIII Biennale of Sacred Art in Bologna. During the sixties he exhibited at three editions of the Rome and Lazio Figurative Arts Review (1961, 1963, 1965) and at the VI Rome Biennale of 1968.

In 1960 he was invited to the “11th edition of the Avezzano prize – national review of Figurative Arts” in Avezzano (AQ), along with R. Brindisi, S. Cavallo, G. Ceracchini, V. Ciardo, E. Fantuzzi, C. Levi, M. Rosa, G. Strachota, F. Trombadori, A. Vangelli and others.

In 1963-64 he exhibited at the exhibition Peintures italiennes d'aujourd'hui, organized in the Middle East and North Africa.