Piero Guccione was born in 1935 to a petty-bourgeois family in Scicli, Sicily. Although neither of his parents were particularly artistically inclined (his father was a tailor and his mother a housewife), they supported his creative appetite early on, allowing him to attend Comiso Art School and later the Catania Art Institute, from which he graduated in 1954. That same year, Guccione moved to Rome, where he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. Unfortunately however, it was not to be a magical experience, and he dropped out after only a month. Although he was to stay in the Italian capital, he seldom painted in his first two years, instead making a living as a graphic designer, while teaching himself about advertising posters, newspaper caricatures and furniture design.
The 1960s saw Guccione travel extensively, notably to the Sahara Desert in Libya, where he took part in missions to survey rock paintings with a team led by the palaeontologist Fabrizio Mori. When not on archaeological sites, Guccione exhibited his first works. His first ever solo exhibition was held at Galleria Elmo in Rome in 1960. The following year, after a request from the American Federation of Art, he organised an exhibition of rock paintings from the Libyan desert at Columbia University in New York, which went on to feature at other major US universities.
Between 1962 and 1965, he was part of the group Il pro e il contro, which included his fellow artists Ugo Attardi, Ennio Calabria, Fernando Farulli, Giuseppe Guerreschi, Alberto Gianquinto and Renzo Vespignani and prominent critics Antonio Del Guercio and Dario Micacchi. New opportunities arose, including the chance to illustrate Stendhal’s classic novel The Red and the Black for the publisher Parenti and take part in the seminal exhibition Peintures italiennes d’aujourd’hui, which toured the Middle East and North Africa. In 1966, he exhibited his work at his first ever Venice Biennale – an experience he would replicate five times (1972, 1978, 1982, 1988 and 2011).
Retrospectives and anthology shows began in the 1970s with an exhibition organised by the city of Ferrara at Palazzo dei Diamanti, which brought together 80 of the most representative works in his corpus from the previous decade. 1971 saw the publication of Guccione’s first monograph, edited by Enzo Siciliano. A comprehensive show organised by Leonardo Sciascia in Palermo marked a stylistic turning point, where the term ‘platitude’ was coined to describe a recent shift in Guccione’s production.
A further shift occurred in the first half of the 1980s. Oil was abandoned in favour of pastels. This new sub-corpus quickly garnered praise and yielded exhibitions, initially in Italy but then across artistic hubs far and wide with exhibitions in Paris (1983, 1988 and 1998), New York (1980, 1985, 1989) and Washington (1984). A second monograph published in 1989, this time edited by both Siciliano and Susan Sontag, concluded the period. In 1992 a large retrospective entitled Variations at Palazzo dei Leoni in Messina kindled a renewed interest in larger, overarching exhibitions of his work. This fascination peaked in 2011 with Massimo Nifosì’s documentary Piero Guccione: towards infinity, which was shown at the Rome International Film Festival, the Madrid Italian Film Festival and the Venice Biennale.
Guccione passed away in 2018.
