455 - Aldo MONDINO (1938-2005)

Aldo MONDINO (1938-2005) Trofeo Black and gold patina bronze proof Signed on the back 87 x 117 x 36 cm (Scratches from use, patina wear) Resale rights are the responsibility of the buyer. This work has been catalogued by the Aldo Mondino Archives, Milan, under number 20060124141008. NOTICE Italian painter and sculptor Aldo Mondino was born in Turin in 1938 and died there in 2005. He first trained in Paris, where he moved in 1959, attending Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17, taking classes at the École du Louvre and learning mosaics at the Académie des Beaux-Arts with Gino Severini and Riccardo Licata. These Parisian years, punctuated by encounters with Matta, Wifredo Lam, Alain Jouffroy, Jean-Jacques Lebel and Erró, nurtured an early style close to Surrealism. Back in Italy, he made his mark in Turin in the 1960s with the Gian Enzo Sperone and Christian Stein galleries - the same ones that revealed Arte Povera - while following a personal, ironic and paradoxical path. He used unusual materials - sugar, caramel, chocolate, seeds, coffee - invented painting on linoleum and also modeled sculptures in patinated bronze. From the 1980s onwards, he developed a neo-orientalist repertoire that has remained famous ever since: whirling dervishes, sultans, rabbi figures and carpets. Present at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and again in 1993, where Achille Bonito Oliva devoted a room of dervishes to him, he has exhibited at the Liechtenstein Palace in Vienna and the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. In public sales, his work is part of the universe of post-war Italian art and rubs shoulders with the great names of Turin's Arte Povera: Mario Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alighiero Boetti and Giuseppe Penone.