Salvo

Biography

Salvo, Salvatore Mangione, was born in Leonforte in the province of Enna on May 22, 1947. He spent his childhood in Sicily and in 1956 moved with his family from Catania to Turin. Since childhood he shows a strong aptitude for drawing and in 1963 participates, with a work taken from Leonardo, depicting an old man's head, at the 121 ^ Exhibition of the Promoting Society of Fine Arts. He paints and sells copies from Rembrant, Van Gogh, Fontana, Chagal, etc. Between September and December 1968 he was in Paris where he immersed himself in the cultural climate that was created around the Student Movement. Back in Turin, he began to frequent the artists of the new generation who worked in the field of Arte Povera  and who found a point of reference in the gallery of Gian Enzo Sperone. He met Boetti, with whom he became friends, Merz, Zorio, Penone and the critics, Renato Barilli, Germano Celant and Achille Bonito Oliva. In this period he devoted himself to conceptual art through photographic montages, such as blessing self-portraits, writings and engravings on marble.  In 1972 he participated in Documenta 5 in Kassel. 1973 is the year of the turning point, in the sense of a return to painting with the recovery of traditional techniques starting with his d'après, such as the self-portrait as Raphael of the '70s. From '76 starts a series of mythological landscapes with knights among archaeological ruins with colors that gradually become brighter and brighter. This production arouses considerable critical feedback and the interest of collectors, including Friedrich Erwin Rentschler who dedicates particular importance to Salvo in his vast collection  of contemporary art. Between 1982 and 1983 its reputation is further consolidated at European level. After the extensive retrospective organized in March 1982 at the Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst in Ghent, in April of the following year the most significant works from 1973 were brought together at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, which immediately after, in July, the Nouveau Musée of Villeurbanne near Lyon proposed to the public French. In 1984 he participated in the XLI Venice Biennale. Between 1985 and 1988 his solo exhibitions were set up in Italy and abroad, in public and private venues.  In March and December 1985 he exhibited at the Galleria dell'Oca in Rome and the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa. In 1986 the exhibitions of recent works by Barbara Gladstone in New York and at the Galleria del Milione in Milan were a considerable success and were followed by the great retrospective inaugurated at the Rotonda in Via Besana in Milan in December 1987. 
In January 1991 in Turin, Sergio Bertaccini's Galleria in Arco proposed a series of interiors with extraordinary functions. The exhibition activity continues regularly in Italy and abroad, in particular in Germany, where on September 25, 1992, at the Galerie Kaess-Weiss in Stuttgart, a solo show was inaugurated in which recent mountain landscapes, railway stations and Umbrian churches appear that a metaphysical light abstracts from time. 
From 1993 to 1995 exhibitions alternated between Munich, Milan and Cologne. In 1998 and 1999 important exhibitions followed in public spaces, in Bologna at the Gallery of Modern Art and at the former Capuchin Convent of Caraglio. In January 2002 our gallery organized an exhibition that was later transferred to Bologna in the frame of Arte Fiera 2002. A second exhibition is organized by our gallery in the period September-November 2007. He died in Turin on September 12, 2015

Salvo - Arte Figurativa

Figurative Art refers to the kind of painting that is simply the representation of the reality that surrounds us or that is supposed to represent the work in its historical context. Often, therefore, the figurative work has a descriptive meaning, of events that happened, or allegorical. Under the Soviet blockade, and partly in Italy, figurative art was very conditioned by ideological constraints as it had to be understood by the masses and aimed at celebrating the successes, usually presumed, of the elites who ruled those countries. In Italy, Renato Guttuso was distinguished as he was able to develop a new language that resulted in works such as La Vucciria and Caffè Greco. Foreign artists include Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland, Lucian Freud, Otto Dix, George Grosz and others with a very personal interpretation of the subjects and pictorial technique