Ugo Nespolo

Ugo Nespolo born at Mosso Santa Maria near Biella on August 29, 1941, studied under Enrico Paulucci at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti of Turin from where he emerged with a degree in Modern Literature having produced a graduate thesis on Semiology.

His career as an artist dates back to the Sixties, the era of Italian Pop Art and the cradle of its future conceptual and Arte Povera movements. In the seventies, Nespolo also took over a new medium : the cinema, particularly of the experimental, artistic variety. The actors in these films were fellow artists from Lucio Fontana to Enrico Baj and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Nespolo's films have been the subject of exhibitions at prestigious institutions like the Beaubourg in Paris, the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw's Filmoteka Polska and Ferrara's Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna. The eighties were the core of his American period. Nespolo spent part of the year in New York and made its streets, shop windows and hamburger cooks the protagonists of his paintings.

This was also the period of Ugo Nespolo's venture into the field of the applied arts. Loyal to the old avantgarde precept that "art needs to be taken into life", he is convinced that the contemporary artist is under an obligation to escape from the prison house of late Romantic cliché. Evidence of this philosophy comes in the fifty or so posters created for a variety of exhibitions and other events, In 1990 Milan's Palazzo Reale presented another major exhibition of Nespolo's work. In that year, he also did prestigious work for clients like the Campari advertising campaign, the sets and costumes for Paisiello's Don Chisciotte at Rome's Teatro dell'Opera. He also had an exhibition of ceramics, his new interest, at the International Biennale of Ceramics and Antiques held in Faenza's Exhibition Center. In 1994 the Aosta Valley Region presented an exhibition of his film work at the Tour Fromage in Aosta. In the following year Nespolo did the sets and costumes for Donizetti's "Elisir d'Amore," a production that appeared at the Rome Opera, the Paris Opera and the Opera House of Lausanne, Liège and Metz. Again in 1995 the exhibition Casa d'Arte Nespolo appeared in Milan's Palazzo della Permanennte and a one-man show of his paintings was put on by the Romanian Ministry of Culture in Bucharest. In May 1996 his one-man show entitled Le Stanze dell'Arte was organized by the Regional Government of Piedmont in Turin's Promotrice delle Belle Arti, A few months later, Ugo Nespolo was appointed Art Director of Richard-Ginori. In April 1997, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta, Malta devoted an exhibition to Nespolo's work, Meanwhile a travelling exhibition of his work opened in Buenos Aires (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes) went to Córdoba (Centra de Arte Contemporaneo de Cordoba, Chateau Carreras) and Mendoza ( Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno de mendoza) and then to Montevideo (Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales). One-man shows, particularly important, are scheduled during 1999: in July at Perugia Rocca Paolina/Spello Villa Fidelia and December 1999 through February 2000 at Palazzo Reale in Naples.

Nespolo was chosen to design the Palio of the Assumption for the August 2007 race in Siena.