Florence, 1888 – Meudon, 1971

Born in Florence in 1888, Alberto Magnelli began to paint in 1907 and as early as 1909 took part in the Venice Biennale. Between 1911 and 1912, he frequented the Italian Avant-garde and the Futurist group, making friends with Marinetti, Boccioni and Carrà. However, he did not join the movement and refused to take part in the group’s activities.

In 1914, he travelled to Paris; here he met painters and writers who gravitated around Apollinaire, including Picasso, Léger and Jacob. He returned to Italy due to the outbreak of war and, on the strength of his Parisian experience, he moved with conviction from figuration to abstraction. From these years are the “lyrical explosions”: abstract paintings with still traces of figuration, in which the expressive power of colour emerges strongly. The works make Magnelli’s painting completely independent of the artistic currents and movements of the period.

In 1931, he moved permanently to Paris and became a member of the Abstraction-Création group, continuing his path towards completely abstract painting. In 1937, he held his first solo exhibition in New York. During the Second World War he lived in the south of France, together with the artists Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Robert and Sonia Delaunay.

Considered one of the great masters of international abstractionism, the 1950s and 1960s marked Alberto Magnelli’s definitive consecration with important exhibitions including the São Paulo Biennale in 1951, the retrospective in 1954 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Documenta in Kassel in 1955 and then in 1963, the retrospective at the Kunsthaus in Zurich. The extreme rigour of geometric forms is combined with compositional inventions, thanks to the research and development of chromatic balances and formal rhythms that enhance both the plastic value of form and colour fields. He died in Meudon in 1971.