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Mario Ceroli

mario_ceroli

Mario Ceroli (Castel Frentano, 1938) is an Italian sculptor and scenographer. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, under the guidance of Leoncillo Leonardi and Pericle Fazzini, reproduced initially ceramic sculptures. In the sixties, impressed by the Pop art through the works of Louise Nevelson and Joe Tilson, came to the materials and forms that would characterize his later creations: silhouette of objects shaped wooden, colorless, sometimes repeated in series (Last dinner, 1965 National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome; Man of Leonardo, 1964; China, 1966), connected to a space that becomes essential theme (Case Sistine, 1966), or draw tempera and ink (The door, the Last Supper, 1981; Day, Night, 1982). In 1967-1968 he participated in exhibitions of Arte Povera group. He was also very active as a set designer, collaborating with the Teatro Stabile in Tourin (setting of Shakespeare’s Richard III, 1968) and La Scala in Milan (scene of Norma by Vincenzo Bellini). In his sculptures, there are frequent quotations from famous works of the past, such as those of Leonardo of which he paraphrased the drawing of “vitruvian man”(Disequilibrium, 1967) and The Last Supper (painted wood, 1981 ).

In 1976 he has realized for San Lorenzo the work “Butterflies in a cage”, a one-off. The strong expressivity of Ceroli’s intuitions is strictly connect with the artist’s autobiographical experience he lived in New York during the sixties. A photo, in which the author is pictured right next to a big wooden installation, which proposes the subject of a butterfly captured by the context, in his New Yorker atelier, correctly documents that period.d una grande installazione in legno che ripropone il soggetto della farfalla prigioniera del contesto.