Renzo Vespignani - Italian Neorealism

 Renzo Vespignani (1924 -2001)was an Italian painter, printmaker and illustrator. Vespignani illustrated the works of Boccaccio, Kafka and T. S. Eliot, among others.In 1956, he co-founded the magazine Citta Aperta ("City Opened") and in 1963, co-founded the group II Pro e II Contro (Pro and Con) for neorealism in figure art.Renzo Vespignani was born in Rome, Italy in 1924, and he grew up in a Roman working-class suburb named Portonaccio. He began to paint during the difficult years of the German occupation of Rome, hiding himself at Lino Bianchi Barriviera’s residence.His drawings in 1944 recorded the ravages of German-occupied Rome in realistic detail.Those images, often likened to German Expressionist works, were featured in his first solo exhibition at Rome's Galleria La Margherita in 1945. Meanwhile, he collaborated as a designer with many political-literary reviews done as poetic documentaries, relating to the cinema of Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica.After the war, Vespignani contributed illustrations to political and literary journals.At New York's Hugo Gallery, his works were introduced to the U.S. in 1948.In 1956 he co-founded, with other intellectuals, the review Citta Aperta ("City Opened"), a magazine concerning the city culture’s problems.At this time, his work had begun to focus on life in the harsh neighborhoods of Rome's periphery, displaying a connection with the films and literature of Italian Neorealism.Wikipedia
 

Inspirations

Nicola Simbari - Neo-Impressionism

Nicola Simbari (July 13, 1927 - December 11, 2012) was an Italian painter.
Though born in San Lucido, Calabria, Nicola Simbari was raised in Rome, where his father was an architect for the Vatican. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and in the 1940s he began devoting himself to painting in a studio at Via del Babuino in central Rome. Simbari's early exposure to the architectural world had a lasting impression on his art, as he incorporated geometric forms and architectural structures into almost all of his paintings. He began to develop a distinct style stemming from impressions of life, nature, and the Mediterranean, impressions which abstractly reflect themselves in the purely vivid and passionate colors of his work. Simbari's originality and commercial appeal brought his art to exhibitions in London and New York by the 1950s, solidifying his international reputation.
Rendered in a distinctive style akin to Neo-Impressionism, Simbari's works employ broad swatches of bright pastel hues to form stylized representations of people and places. His oeuvre features recurring landscape scenes of Mediterranean environments, often with partially nude women bathing or in the process of dress. 

Chiyu Uemae - Monochromatic Abstract Painting

While GUTAI being highly acclaimed in recent years, Uemae is one of the oldest witnesses of the group and its period. In contrast to Shimamoto, the charm of Uemae ( 1920 – 2018 ) consists in the elaborated matières and its accumulation of introspective energies. Experiencing various jobs such as crane operator, apprentice to traditional dyeing factory in Kyoto, Uemae studies firstly Chinese “Nan-ga” as self-taught, then shifts to oil painting. In 1953, Uemae meets Yoshihara, since then, the artist takes part in every Gutai exhibition until its dissolution. His wide-ranging creation from two-dimensional works which are composed of pattern accumulation by painting knife or of sensitive stitch to sculptural works made of wood or saw dust, comes from his broad experience in his adolescence.Uemae artist  went his own way. “My life’s work has been dedicated to absorbing new artistic styles, and pursuing my own unique approach to painting,” he said of his own practice, adding that this “was entirely possible despite my being a member of the Gutai group.” It was a surprising sentiment from an artist who had relentlessly sought Yoshihara’s approval and stayed with the group until it disbanded in 1972. Doggedly focused on the flat picture plane (though he does occasionally make sculpture) and eschewing performance, Uemae was forced onto the “solitary path” 

Domoto Hisao - Avant-Garde Abstract Art - Gutai Group

"Domoto Hisao was also born in 1928, and was primarily trained as a nihonga artist in his youth. When he moved to France in 1955, the artist found it increasingly difficult to continue using Japanese pigments as the dominant medium for his artworks, and switched to oil painting. His move to France also precipitated a meeting with the Informel group, who was gaining increasing moment from the fifties onwards. Almost immediately upon his arrival in France, Domoto’s works took on an Abstractionist flair, and were created organically with swift movements resembling half-circles swinging freely throughout the canvas. This bold movement is reminiscent of clouds or even waves, and aims to mimic nature. As can be seen in Painting 1960-14 (Lot 704), which is an early example of Domoto’s technique of mimesis of the ebbing and flowing inherent to his oeuvre, much attention has been paid to the balance of positive and negative space. Coupled with the light brushwork of each stroke, one is immediately reminded of delicate Eastern calligraphy or even lightly-pigmented scrolls, and it is easy to feel the amalgamation of such two worlds through the swift and bold undulations of his canvas. According to Tapié, who lavished praise on Domoto’s works, the importance of space was at the heart of the artist’s success at marrying Eastern and Western influences. They were all filled with “an ambiguous space that subsumes both the dialectical attainments of Western mathematicians in topological composition and the intuitive properties that Eastern painting has carefully upheld down through centuries. Which is to say that, no matter how complex, Domoto’s paintings are always elegant and intuitive, yet have the precision of clearly delineated proofs.”3 In such a way, Domoto can be understood as among the first of all Japanese artists—if not the first—to be able to marry traditional structured Western composition with the lyrical freedoms of Eastern philosophy."(sothebys.com)

  Avant-Garde Art