Giulio Turcato was born in Mantua in 1912. He studied art in Venice, attending the local arts high school and school for the art of the nude. After brief periods in Palermo and Milan, where he worked in Giovanni Muzio’s architectural studio, he settled in Rome in 1943. It was in the Italian capital that he frequented Osteria Fratelli Menghi, a renowned meeting point for painters, directors, screenwriters, writers and poets between the 1940s and 1970s. Alongside fellow artists Emilio Vedova and Toti Scialoja, Turcato began to exhibit in the Italian capital.
After a period in the Italian resistance during the Second World War, he moved to Paris in 1946 to study the avant-garde, including the works of Kandinsky and Picasso. Stimulated by his environment, he signed the Forma I manifesto in 1947 and joined the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti group, exhibiting with them at the 1948 Venice Biennale. However, disagreements over ideology and a rejection of social realism eventually saw Turcato take a different direction. In 1952, certain in his conviction that art and politics could not be reconciled, he joined the Group of Eight alongside Afro Basaldella, Renato Birolli, Antonio Corpora, Giuseppe Santomaso, Ennio Morlotti, Emilio Vedova and Mattia Moreni.
In his own artistic development, Turcato gravitated towards symbolic violence, balanced with a monochrome use of colours that seemed to flow slowly from the canvas and the use of basic materials such as sand and rubber. But geometric formality gradually gave way to free-form, gestural strokes. Political subjects were abandoned in favour of regional and spiritual influences, mainly Zen. The influence of American abstract expressionism also manifested itself in his choice of larger canvases.
In the 1960s, his corpus began to take on a different form with a mixture of collages and painted details recalling surrealist creations from 30 years earlier. Here too, his scale would only grow in ambition as time passed.
Turcato exhibited at the Venice Biennale frequently: in 1948, 1954, 1956, 1958, 1966, 1968, 1972, 1982, 1986, 1988, 1993 and 1995. Other notable shows included the National Review of Figurative Arts at the fifth Quadriennale in Rome (1948), Peintures italiennes d’aujourd’hui, an itinerant exhibition of the Middle East and North Africa (1963–1964) and a retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome (1987). He also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Milan, the State Gallery of Modern Art in Munich, Musée de l’Athenée in Geneva and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to name but a few.
He was garlanded with several prizes during his career, including first prize at the Premio del Golfo in La Spezia (1951), the purchase award for the first edition of the Spoleto Prize (1953) and the Prime Minister’s Prize.