Pietro Consagra

Born in 1920 in Mazara del Vallo, Italy; dies in 2005 in Milan, Italy.

Consagra completes his studies at the Academy of Fine Art of Palermo, in 1944 he moves from Sicily to Rome, where he starts working in the studio of Mazzacurati and Guttuso. In Rome, he meets Piero Dorazio, Ugo Attardi, Carla Accardi, Antonio Sanfilippo, Achille Perilli, Mino Guerrini and Giulio Turcato, with whom he writes, in March 1947, the manifesto of the abstractionist group “Forma 1”. In 1948, he takes part at the Quadrennial of Rome. Since the 1950s he creates sculptural reliefs almost two-dimensional, in which he blurs the thickness until reaching the thin sheets of the great Città frontale, as in Piccolo colloquio Romano of 1957, Paris, National Museum of Modern Art. In 1978, he is among the promoters of an important document on the preservation of historic centres, entitled the Carta di Matera. In 1981, for the reconstruction of Gibellina, in Belice, he realises La Porta del Belice a star 24 meters high, made of stainless steel. Among his later major works, his large marble sculpture dedicated to Janus, more than five meters high, located in Largo Santa Susanna in Rome. He is awarded with the gold medal for Meritorious Culture and Arts by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.