ENRICO PRAMPOLINI

Enrico Prampolini (Modena, 20 April 1894 - Rome, 17 June 1956) was an Italian painter, sculptor, set designer and costume designer.In 1912 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, but was expelled the following year for having published a anti-academic manifesto. A prominent exponent of Futurism, he attended the studio of Giacomo Balla. It has close contacts with the representatives of the European artistic avant-garde: with Dadaism, the Bauhaus, the De Stijl, with Pablo Picasso, Vasilij Kandinskij and Jean Cocteau. It occupies a place of its own in the European panorama of abstract art. It is characterized by its deep interest in dynamism and organicism, which will manifest itself in the thirties and forties in cosmic and dreamlike visions. After the futurist experience, he also made polymaterial and bioplastic works, in which he sometimes appears influenced by visions of the microcosm. His intent, as he himself stated, is to express the extreme latitudes of the introspective world. In Paris, in 1925, he came into contact with Surrealism, which was affected by his phase called "cosmic idealism". It is a pictorial style that combines biomorphic and non-object forms, sometimes with polymaterial inserts. His most typical production is to be found in the sketches for scenography: he was the holder of the scenography chair at the Brera Academy in Milan. Among his numerous works, the Cosmic Maternity is particularly suggestive, conserved at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.