Renato Mambor

He began as a cinema poster designer, screenwriter and also an actor (he also participated as a performer in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita). He made his debut as a painter at the age of twenty-three, in 1959, in an exhibition at the Appia Antica Gallery in Rome. He obtained his first recognition in 1960, with an “Encouragement Award” from the National Gallery of Modern Art, followed by exhibitions at the Galleria La Tartaruga di Plinio De Martiis (1963, 1964 and following years).

Despite having started painting at the end of the fifties, he created works that were very far from the dominant informal climate: thus his “statistical men” were born, faceless human silhouettes, painted in colorful homogeneous. He then uses road signs, photographic tracings, stamps, tapestry rollers, to represent the icons of mass media culture. In the sixties he became a prominent element of the “Piazza del Popolo School”, a sort of Italian response, between metaphysics and futurism, to American Pop Art. In the seventies, influenced by the bond with the actress Paola Pitagora, his interest gradually focused on theater and the body. Attracted by the mechanical nature and “objectivity” of the photographic medium, he begins to create “photographed actions”, halfway between body art and performance. In 1975 he founded and directed the Trousse theater company. He returned to painting in the nineties, and in that decade he dedicated himself above all to reflection on the relationship between Art and Reality.

He creates large graphic cycles (National Institute for Graphics, Rome 1998; Galleria Civica di Modena 1999), but also spectacular installations, such as the six emptied buses, each inhabited by an artist , for the exhibition “Bus stop”, Rome 1996. In the performance “Fasce di pensiero” (1998) he reiterates the general meaning of his work: “finding within the eye the gaze that reaches consciousness”. Among the main exhibitions: Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 1993 (personal), Pecci Museum in Prato in 1998, Triennale di Milano in 2004, National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 2007 (personal), Venice Biennale in 2007.