Ugo Attardi

Born near Genoa to Sicilian parents, at the age of one he moved with them to Palermo, where the fascist regime forced them to return, due to his father’s trade union activity. Fundamental in his career as an artist was his arrival in Rome in 1945, where he frequented Guttuso’s studio, and already in 1947 he entered the heart of the artistic debate by participating (together with Accardi, Consagra, Dorazio, Guerrini, Perilli, Sanfilippo and Turcato ) to the foundation of “Forma 1”, the first Italian abstractionist group after the Second World War. Shortly afterwards, however, he felt a renewed impulse towards figuration, albeit visionary and problematic, and definitively distanced himself from abstract experience, without however forgetting some of its formal conquests: he gave life to a personal “classical-expressionist” poetics, based on a dramatic co-presence of opposites: “classic” beauty and deformity, tenderness and violence, physicality and dreaminess.

Starting from the 1950s he participated several times in the Venice Biennale and the Rome Quadrennial, and held large solo exhibitions in the most important Italian exhibition spaces. In 1961 he joined the group “Il Pro e il Contro”, alongside Calabria, Farulli, Gianquinto, Guccione and Vespignani.

He wrote the novel The Wild Heir, published in 1970, and for which he received the Viareggio Prize for fiction in 1971.

In 1967 he began a fervent activity as a sculptor and, after The Addio Che Guevara in 1968, some wooden groups were born, including The Pizarro‘s arrival in 1969-71, and bronzes marked by strong sensuality.

His monumental sculptures are located in the main European and world capitals. Among them The Vascello della Revolution (1988), in Rome, at the Palazzo dello Sport; In the Americas, 1992, in Buenos Aires; the famous Ulysses, from 1996, in New York; Enea (2004), at the port of Valletta (Malta). The great Christ of 2002 has become part of the collections of the Vatican Museums.

In 2006 the artist received the title of Grand Officer of the Republic from President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, for his artistic merits and for having been able to spread and valorise the Italian genius and creativity. He died in Rome on 21 July of the same year.