Toti Scialoja

This roman based painter and poet reffered to as an original and multifaceted artist has switched from expressionism to abstractionism in painting and from nonsense poetry and limericks to theatre set-up.

During his time as teacher and headmaster at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome he had many contemporary artists like Mario Ceroli, Pino Pascali or Janis Kounnelis as students.

While in his expressionist, roman school of painting related period,during WWII, he displays his work alongside Giulio Turcato and Emilio Vedova. After 1950, Scialoja, like Emilio Scanavino, immerses into the informal abstractionism, taking distance from the original expressionism and cubism.He also starts experimenting with different techniques, from dripping to using pieces of cloth dipped in paint, from printing to material insertions.

He marries roman painter Titina Maselli and takes part if the Biennale di Venezia in 1950, 1952 and 1954. He gains international fame, travels to Paris and New York where he meets other abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko or Willem de Kooning.

During the 1970s Scialoja has a long reflexive pause in the art field that coincides though with an explosion of poetic creativity, only to come back to his first love, painting, at the beginning of 1980. His artworks, at first structured in rhythmic articulated geometrical elements become a language of gestural matrix. This decade is characterized by a strong inspiration from Goya’s paintings from Prado and considered the apex of his career.