Novelli Gastone

Gastone Novelli, a painter born in Vienna, lived in Rome since childhood. After the war, he moved to Brazil where he lived for several years and participated in the first Biennales in Sao Paulo. Since 1955 he returned to Rome, and he was in contact with Emilio Villa, Corrado Cagli, Achille Perilli, Cy Twombly and many others. His paintings were enriched in this period by collage and raw materials, at the end of the fifties he experimented and matured a language related to signs and writings and drawing directly on canvas. He collaborated with various writers in the field of editorial graphics: he illustrated texts by Bataille and Manganelli, he had links and exchanges with poets and writers who were part of Group 63. Letters, phrases and words became part of his work. In 1968, invited to hold a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, he refused to exhibit and turned the paintings upside down against the walls, protesting against the intervention of the police in the Giardini and expressing his solidarity with the student struggle. In the same year he moved to Milan, where he began teaching at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. His works are housed in major European museums and in various overseas collections.