Luigi Ontani was born in Vergato, Bologna, in 1943. Although he trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, one could argue that his military service, which he undertook in Turin between 1963 and 1964, was the more formative artistic experience. Ontani used his time in the city to visit museums and avant-garde galleries, putting down roots for a cultural network of gallery owners and emerging artists. The period was also one of extensive reading, notably Apollinaire and Pirandello, authors who would prove to be a lasting influence in his transgressive approach to art and creativity.
Following this unique education, Ontani returned to Vergato in 1965, where he continued to teach himself and experiment with different techniques and materials, also attending an open life drawing class at the Academy of Fine Arts. It was during this period that he embarked upon his Oggetti pleonastici, which celebrated the futility of objects by transforming them into talismans and other items of power worn and arranged on the body of the artist or on trees. Indirectly, the subject was always the artist himself, through the prism of mythological, literary and popular themes. The scale of his work varied between the infinitely small to the infinitely large. His photography would pave the way for living paintings – large installations with the artist as subject and protagonist portrayed in a myriad of ways – for which he is best known today.
In 1970 Ontani moved to Rome where, directly influenced and inspired by his new surroundings, he expanded his horizons and explored fresh expressive forms akin to early performance and conceptual art. He started to garner interest and success on the world stage. In 1977, for example, he exhibited his works in New York for the first time at the prestigious Sonnabend Gallery. The creative lure of oriental influences also became increasingly prevalent, an aesthetic relationship aided greatly by a formative trip to India in 1974 – a defining moment in his career. In 1982 Ontani took part in the seminal exhibition Italian Art Now: An American Perspective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York alongside fellow Italian artists Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Gilberto Zorio, Giuseppe Penone, Nino Longobardi and Vettor Pisani.
In the 1980s, driven by a spirit of discovery and creativity, Ontani’s style gravitated towards increasingly surreal, dreamlike inspirations combined with technical skill. The artist produced a wide variety of works in contrasting materials, a series of paintings depicting slender, mythically inspired figures co-existing with items made from papier-mâché, wood, china and glass.
Decades after he emerged, Ontani remains difficult to pin down. The man who has variously described himself as an unfaithful angel, as androgynous and ephebic, a hermaphrodite and a Sagittarius, does little to lift the confusion. A master of metamorphosis, he has been everyone and no one, appropriating the traits of Leonardo, Dante, Krishna, Saint Sebastian and even Pinocchio. His work is a reprisal of human and artistic history through the constant transformation of image and the self.
Ontani has participated in several editions of the Venice, Sydney and Lyon Biennales. He recently enjoyed four major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York (2001), the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art (SMAK) in Ghent (2003–2004), the Museum of Modern Art (MAMbo) in Bologna (2008), and the National Academy of San Luca in Rome (2017), from which he received the President of the Republic Award in 2015.
