Giuseppe Capogrossi

Giuseppe Capogrossi was born in 1900 in Rome. After earning a law degree in 1922, he decided to become an artist and began to study under the fresco painter Giambattista Conti, and later at the studio of Felice Carena. Around the same time he formed a close relationship with the painter Emanuele Cavalli, an association that would last some twenty years.

In 1933 he traveled several times to Paris, where he became particularly interested in the work of Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

In 1939 he was given his own room at the Quadriennale of Rome. The postwar years saw Capogrossi paint his first abstract works, and by the end of 1949 he had developed a distinct post-Cubist vocabulary of his own, formalizing a language of signs that involved the arrangement of comblike matrices in compositions that were at once logical and free, aligning him closely with the Art Informel movement.

In 1950 he was one of the founders of Gruppo Origine, together with Mario Ballocco, Alberto Burri and Ettore Colla in Milan. The group rented a gallery space in Rome where they had their only exhibition in January 1951. The show wasn't successful and the four disbanded a few months later.

Capogrossi subsequently became one of the main exponents of Italian informal art, together with Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri. Capogrossi participated in the Premio Bergamo in 1939, 1940 and 1942, and in exhibitions such as the first edition of Documenta in Kassel (1955) and the third and fifth São Paulo Art Biennial in 1955 and 1957. Capogrossi died in Rome in 1972.