Lugano
Fausto Melotti was born in Rovereto in 1901. In 1924, he graduated in Electrotechnical engineering at Polytechnic University of Milan. In 1928, to pursue his growing interest in the Arts, he enrolled at Brera Academy in Milan, where he attended the sculpture courses taught by Adolfo Wildt. There, he met the artist and sculptor Lucio Fontana, a fellow student that would later become a close friend. In 1935, Melotti exhibited twice at Galleria del Milione with a group show and his first solo show, getting close to all the most important abstract artists in Italy. In the same year, he joined Abstraction Création, an artist association founded in Paris in 1931 with the purpose of promoting non-figurative art in Europe.
His artistic production started with sculpture and then expanded to drawings, paintings and poems. After the war, he mainly focused on ceramics and he established a collaboration with Gio Ponti and his architecture and design magazine “Domus”. In 1967, a solo sculpture show at Galleria Toninelli in Milan decreed the beginning of his national and international success. His work would be then shown in New York, London, Zurich and Paris. His writings and poems were published by Adelphi in 1974 and they made him won the Diano Marina Prize in 1975. He died in Milan in 1986; Venice Biennale commemorated him in the same year with the Golden Lion.
