On the occasion of EXPO 2015, Antonio Battaglia Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Eugenio Carmi, after the important retrospective which Palazzo Ducale in Genova has dedicated to him in order to celebrate his long artistic life.
One of the protagonists of concrete abstraction, Eugenio Carmi is presented in this exhibition by the various phases which have signed his career. From art consultant of Italsider, the largest Italian steel firm, to a well-known painter, from the sixties series of litographed sheets of tin plate realized with industrial printed proof to the series of “imaginary electric signs” made of plexiglas and neon lights in the seventies with rigorous geometric forms which characterize his work, up to arrive at juta canvases from eighties to nowadays, where poetic coloured fields prevail.
What affects in this itinerary is the coherence which shows from all the different works: an harmony which is not static and motionless but fluid and dynamic, an harmony which has met different tolls and techniques, using the same attention to details, geometric composition and visual perception.
Art tends to frame the artist's work in movements and tendencies, we can see Eugenio Carmi as an experimenter or, how he describes himself, an “image-maker”.
Eugenio Carmi was born in Genoa on 1920. He is based and works in Milan. In forties he graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in chemistry; he was also in contact with international cultural movements attended in the city. He began to paint in the high school and, back in Italy, he studied in Turin following Felice Casorati. From fifties he is part of italian abstract art, with previous informal style and then with rigorous geometric forms, even though asymmetrical and “rebels”, which he has developed during his career. The current works, as the artist says, are a dialog with the natural laws and they remind the art of fifties anda sixties with their interventions of different materials.
His first solo exhibition, curated by Gillo Dorfles, was at Galleria Numero in Florence. He worked as art consultant of Italsider from 1958 to 1965.
In 1963 he founded the Galleria del Deposito in Boccadasse, an old fishing village located on the edge of Genoa, where numerous international artists had beed exhibitied – one of the many, Lucio Fontana, Agostino Bonalumi, Paolo Scheggi, Achille Perilli, Max Bill and Victor Vasarely.
In 1973 he realized an italian TV abstract program of 25 minutes and, in the same year, he gave lectures on visual art at the Rhode Island Institute of Design in Providence (USA); in seventies he taught at Accademy of Fine Arts in Macerata and in Ravenna. He illustrated three fairy tales written by Umberto Eco (The bomb and the general, The three astronauts, The gnomes of Gnù), published in Italy and in many other countries. He took part in two Venice Biennale: the first in 1966 with the electronic work SPCE and after in 2011. His important works take part in famous collections, such as Chamber of Deputies in Rome, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, The Quadriennale di Roma, and in several museums in Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Poland and United States.