Gianpaolo Berto, Death in Venice, Etching, 1974

Death in Venice is an artwork realized by Gianpaolo Berto, 1974. Etching, 60 x 50 cm. Edition 34/40, Dated 74' in the lower left part. Very good conditions Gian Paolo Berto was born and raised in the limited but fervent post-war artistic environment of Adria where, apart from the isolated and not yet rediscovered genius of the Anglo-Saxon Foster, a new cultural climate was forming alongside the figures of Scarpari, Reali, Rizzi, Palmieri , Gioli. Then in Rovigo he studied with Prudenziato and Breseghello and was friends with Gabbris Ferrari. The meeting with the masters Zancanaro and Levi was dazzling and constituted the springboard for this eclectic artist into the world of contemporary Italian painting. Despite having been among the very few admitted to the studio of De Chirico (but also of Guttuso and Picasso), and having exhibited in prestigious galleries and museums, Berto has always exempted himself from appearing in the shop windows of the large art market, preferring contact , in an anti-elitist key, with the most genuine circles of the public: students, simple people, artists and intellectuals who conduct their research with rigor and autonomy with respect to fashions and currents. This does not mean that his painting is detached from the context of contemporary art. Indeed, the painter's characteristic appropriation of the reality that surrounds him and of the evolving forms of painting, in Berto is explicit and, as often happens in art, prophesying. In fact, the debt contracted by American Pop towards European Pop is well known: a front which at the time found an attentive and operational Berto and then, in the following decades, ready to grasp the flowering of the subsequent frontiers of art.