Lugano
Osvaldo Licini was born in 1894 in Monte Vidon Corrado, a small town in Marche, Italy. In 1908, he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna. During his studies, Futurism was at its peak. Licini was attracted by this movement and he attended some futurists events in Modena. Being injured during World War I, he had the opportunity to reach his family in Paris. There, he met artists such as Picasso, Cocteau, Kisling and Modigliani and he exhibited his works at the Salon d’Automne, Salon des Indipendents, and at the Italian painters’ exhibition curated by Mario Tozzi. In 1926, he was part of the exhibition of the Italian Novecento curated by Margherita Sarfatti at Palazzo della Permanente in Milan. That year, he moved back to his home town. During this period, Licini focused his research on analysing and developing the pictorial language of Matisse and Cézanne, avoiding a merely derivative approach. At the beginning of the ’30s, he became increasingly interested in the new abstract movements that were spreading through Europe, such as Abstraction-Création in Paris. He slowly converted to abstraction, and in 1934 he exhibited at Quadriennale in Rome along with the group of Italian abstract painters that gathered themselves around Galleria del Milione in Milan. His passion for abstraction became so fervent, that he destroyed and overpainted many of his previous works. In 1950, he exhibited nine canvases at the Venice Biennale, where for the first time appeared a character that would become recurrent in his production: Amalassunta, an elusive and mysterious figure that sometimes Licini identified with a personification of the moon. During the following years Licini received some important critical acknowledgements and he kept on painting, expanding with full liberty the style he had worked on in the previous years. He died in Monte Vidon Corrado in 1958. In 1986, Centro Studi Osvaldo Licini was founded.