Lucio Fanti was born in Bologna in 1945. Though born in Italy, he trained in London and settled in Paris in 1965. Fanti quickly began to exhibit his work in the French capital, taking part in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, along with others from the ‘Narrative Figuration’ movement, who were critically and aesthetically united under the quill of critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot.
With a touch of magical humour, Fanti has allowed seemingly heterogeneous narratives to coexist in his art. In his early work, he hijacked Soviet imagery to denounce the movement’s hypocrisy. Later, Mayakovski’s figures of tragedy and poetry began to permeate Fanti’s art, as did the ageless theme of Nature. Despite these diverse sources of interest and inspiration, Fanti’s aesthetic is characterised by unconscious personal stylistic elements that provide his oeuvre with a coherent through-line.
His art has travelled the world in the form of solo exhibitions in Paris, Rome, Milan and Venice, Nîmes, Grenoble, Le Cailar and Budapest. An ambitious double retrospective of Fanti’s work took place at the Musée Estrine in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 2011, which brought together his artistic and theatrical works.
As the 2011 retrospective suggests, a fundamental complementary artistic activity to Fanti’s painting is his creation of renowned theatre sets. Fanti has collaborated with the best directors of his era: Jean-Pierre Vincent, Jean Jourdheuil, Ermanno Olmi, Klaus Michael Grüber, Bernard Sobel, Luc Bondy et Peter Stein. His partnership with the latter earned him the Laurence Olivier Award for best set of the year in 1986. Theatres in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Salzburg, Lyon, Cardiff, Barcelona, Bergamo and London have all welcomed set pieces and designs by Fanti.
