Luigi Mainolfi was born in Rotondi, Campania, in 1948. He studied at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts. Ineluctably attracted to its cultural momentum as the avant-garde capital of the 1960s, he moved to Turin in 1973.
Often described as post-conceptual due to chronology, his style is more closely associated with the minimalist generation that preceded his own. His work from the early 1970s centred around the body and its gestures, with the body serving as a medium of expression. One of his signature creations was the use of tracing paper with chalk outlines of his body left to become distorted and deformed in water. Towards the end of the decade, ancient symbols and archaic motifs started to appear in his work. He also fully embraced the theoretical facets of sculpture, adding written texts as an accompaniment to many of his material pieces.
Figuration re-emerged some time later, with biological and zoological referents fuelling fantastical hybrid and mutated cities. Order (the city) was mixed with disorder (fantastical hybridisation) in terracotta sculptures of a distinctly tactile quality. After clay, other more traditional material supplemented his work, such as bronze, plaster, stone, lava and wood. Overall, he achieved a more timeless and universally folkloric approach to sculpture through the fantastical.
The final two decades of the 20th century saw a flurry of exhibitions, including at Galleria de’ Foscherari, Bologna, Alfonso Artiaco Gallery, Pozzuoli and the Di Meo Gallery, Paris (1988); Tucci Russo Gallery, Turin (1989); the Noire Gallery in Turin (1990); Piero Cavellini Gallery, Brescia (1991); Gian Ferrari Gallery, Milan and the Municipal Museum of Rimini (1992); Alfonso Artiaco Gallery, Pozzuoli (1993); Villa delle Rose, Bologna, and Prague City Gallery (1994); Galleria de’ Foscherari, Galleria Studio G7 and the Otto Gallery of Contemporary Art, Bologna (1998).
