Nanni Valentini 1932 - 1985
Nanni Valentini is one of the most singular and lively personalities in the artistic explorations of the postwar period.
His approach to material, colour and figure immediately marked him out as unique in the contemporary debate. His learned and wise approach, combined with the dry potency of his sculptural visions, had no parallel among them.
The career of Valentini, who met a premature death in 1985, began, he was just 24 year old, with the prize that he was awarded in the Faenza National Ceramic Competition in 1956 (he will be awarded even in 1961 and 1977), followed by the one he won in 1958 at the Everson Museum of Fine Arts of Syracuse (New York State).
His friendships with Fontana, Tancredi and the brothers Giò and Arnaldo Pomodoro, a strong attraction to the study of the most disparate intellectual fields, and his immersion in the Milanese scene of the 1960s rapidly carried his poetics from ceramics to a fundamental reasoning about the sculptural form and the image.
In the 1970s works such as Paesaggi d’argilla and Garze expressed his desire to reinterpret the clay of the earth as the possibility of infinite transitions and realities, and no longer as a simple medium.
This was the starting-point of his profound, immensely rich artistic poetics consisting of clumps of earth, landscapes, bricks, gauzes, faces and dwellings.
In the crucial decade 1975-1985 Valentini was recognised as one of the most important living ceramic sculptors; in 1976 he secured a place for himself on the Milanese scene with a memorable one-man show of paintings (Trasparenze) and sculptures in Carla Pellegrini’s Galleria Milano.
During the first part of the Eighties he eld several solo shows in relevant galleries as Babel in Heilbronn in 1981, Vera Biondi in Firenze and Galerie -e in Munich in 1982. In the same year he has a one-man show at 40th Venice Biennale and he exhibit in “La sovrana inattualità” show at Museum des XX Jahrhunderts in Vien.
In 1984 get a large solo show at Padigione d'Arte Contemporanea (P.A.C.) in Milan where he presented Deriva, Annunciazione and Il dialogo (his Cratere enter in the permanent collection of Civico Museo d'Arte Contemporanea of Milano at Palazzo Reale), thenhe inaugurated his one-man show on ‘homes’ in the Museu de Ceràmica in Barcelona and again at Galerie -e of Munich. The following year he eld and exhibition at San Luca gallery in Bologna, but he passes away suddenly on December 5th.
His works have also been shown and are present in many public and private collections, including the Museo del Novecento in Milan, the Museo Civico di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Varese, the Everson Museum of Fine Arts in Syracuse, the Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan, the Museu de Ceràmica in Barcelona, the Hetjens Museum in Dusseldorf, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the GAM in Turin, the Galleria Civica in Modena, and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Faenza.