New York, 1919 – 2007
Salvatore Scarpitta was born in New York in 1919; his father was a sculptor who had emigrated from Sicily and his mother was a Russian-Polish actress. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Los Angeles. Here he was a regular visitor to the Legion Ascot Speedway circuit, where his passion for motor racing and racing cars was born.
After completing his studies in 1936, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he graduated in 1940. During the Second World War, he enlisted in the US Navy, which tasked him as “Monument Men” with finding and cataloguing works stolen by the Nazis. After the war, he returned to Italy and settled in Rome.
In the 1950s, he exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad and participated in the Venice Biennale in 1952, 1956 and 1958. Also in 1958, he exhibited his works with bandages and shaped canvases at the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome, which attracted the attention of Leo Castelli. Invited to exhibit at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1959, Scarpitta returned to the United States and established a lasting and fruitful working relationship and friendship with the American gallery owner. Their collaboration will last until 1998, when the gallery closed. In the following decades, he participated in numerous exhibitions in both the United States and Italy.
Starting in the 1960s, Scarpitta began to combine his passion for racing cars with his artistic research, incorporating car components or elements from the world of motor racing into his works or building facsimiles of racing cars.
Scarpitta’s works are part of the collections of major international museums. He passed away in New York in 2007.
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