Carlo Zauli
Carlo Zauli (Faenza 1926-2002) is one of the great figures of twentieth-century Italian sculpture. As with other important figures from previous generations, from Martini to Fontana to Leoncillo, Zauli’s technical training took place in the field of ceramic art, whose formal codes Zauli distanced himself from in the 1960s to evolve towards a complex form of plastic research and expressive richness. The transition from informal moods to a reasoning on geometric form as a rhetorical structure led him to enter the heart of the plastic debate of the time. His solo show at the Galleria Montenapoleone in Milan in 1957 is intertwined with creations executed in a perfect climate of integration of the arts (a frieze for the palace of Baghdad, 1958; frieze for the State Printing Office of Kuwait City, 1961; participation in the Milan Triennale of 1954, 1957, 1964 & 1968) and with the intense association with artists such as Fontana, Valentini, Pomodoro and Spagnulo.
From the end of the Sixties his sculpture unfolded into a series of probing questions where the formative vocation of the material, the relationship between substance and skin of the plastic body, the dialectic between biomorphism and geometry, and the constructive behaviors of the form a l became central to his work. Alongside large solo exhibitions (Musées Royaux d’Art d’Histoire in Brussels and Hetjens-Museum in Dusseldorf, 1972; traveling solo exhibition in Osaka, Tokyo, Nagoya and Kyoto, 1974; traveling solo exhibition in Fukuoka, Takoname and Tokyo, 1981) and works of architectural integration, there were more intimate shows in ga leries and public spaces that aligned to give his work an international scope, as confirmed by the traveling retrospective held in Kyoto, Gifu, Tokyo and Hagi between 2007 and 2008. Zauli passed away in 2002. Today, his works are present in more than forty museums around the world.
