Donatello Losito

Donatello Losito (born October 26, 1940 in Cologne , † February 19, 2008 in Berlin ) was an Italian-German painter, graphic artist and object artist.

Life

Donatello Losito was born the son of the Italian painter and sculptor Luigi Losito and his wife Lieselotte, an interpreter for French and Italian. In 1944 the family moved to Magdeburg due to the war . There he attended school, but for political reasons he was not allowed to go to secondary school. 1955–1958 he trained as a plasterer and restorer. While traveling through France and Italy in 1959/1960, he made his first works in oil and watercolor.

In 1961 he moved to West Berlin and attended the master school for arts and crafts until 1964. After the wall was built in 1961, Losito decided to work with fellow students at the master school to enable students and lecturers at the master school who lived in East Berlin to escape to West Berlin. The escape actions were carried out through the sewer system and with forged passports. In June 1965 he was arrested in Magdeburg and in December 1965 he was sentenced to four years in prison by the Magdeburg District Court for aiding and abetting the so-called " republic escape " and forgery of documents.

After 18 months in prison , the Federal Republic of Germany bought Donatello Losito free . At first he worked as a freelance graphic artist, later he devoted himself entirely to free painting. In 1969 he met the architect Sigrid Kressmann-Zschach , who later became his wife. He conducted solo exhibitions and participated in numerous exhibitions. His main artistic work was created during these years.

In 1990 Sigrid Kressmann-Zschach died. Losito took over the management of numerous companies and administrations and carried out construction projects. He did not return to painting until his death.

Married Joanna Fraino in 2007.

Donatello Losito died on February 19, 2008. His final resting place is together with Sigrid Kressmann-Zschach in the forest cemetery in Zehlendorf .

Donatello Losito has the Losito with his will. Kressmann-Zschach-Foundation established. His choice of name shows that his wife, who had died before him, just as he has declared the establishment of the foundation as her will.

Performance and work

In 1972 the art critic Helmut Kotschenreuther wrote about the first major solo exhibition “Losito has a sensitive eye for the grotesque, the comic, the uncanny, the inhumane in our desolate world and at the same time has the ability to use the most concise, the“ striking ” to find a pictorial formula ”.

Losito's view of the world was not subject to any fashionable fluctuations, but it was - that can be said after his death - far-sighted: no other German artist has the "digitally networked world" of the 21st century so early, so aptly, which means: so recognized threatening. When Losito discovered the computer as an object of art in the early seventies, the "Internet" had not yet been invented, only a few physicists knew what "printed circuits" could be and the horror visions of transparent people lacked real facts ( Hans Halter ) .

In the artist's opinion, the new dimensions of the approaching computer age do not override the basic nature of the human-nature relationship. Integrated circuits as microscope slides condense into works of an almost “perversely beautiful aesthetic”, as the art magazine 1984 found. However, "With the words connection, knotting, networking per se, I am referring to the fundamental networking of nature and people," Losito replied.

The self-study of the shadow realm behind the banally visible captivated him for a long time. The anatomical structure, which is often only sketched, becomes an integral part of his astonishingly variable visual art. The drawings that Losito used to illustrate “Candid”, Voltaire's famous philosophical novel in 1980, are a widely recognized testimony of her. The large-format book was published in 1981 with over a hundred individual drawings that are fragmentary to one another. (limited edition rotadruck, Rainer Hindersmann).

How in “Candid” realities and utopias alternate by “unexpectedly flowing into one another”, Heinz Ohff judged in 1981, “styles, modern and old, and allegories alternate with each other in Losito's drawings by passing the balls. There is something both superior and deliberate about it, like that freshly gripping spontaneity that distinguishes the shrewd draftsman, who has gone through many schools, time and again, in both senses of the word ”.

Works (selection)

• 1972 Cain and Abel on the computer
• 1976/1980 portraits of his wife Sigrid, Jule Hammer , Ben Wagin a. a.
• 1977/1981 numerical landscapes
• 1980/1983 Networked portraits with X-rays
• 1971/1989 humus leaves
• 1984/1986 Copitagen (26 papers)
• 1988/1989 Alta moda
• 1986/1987 Cornuto Mephisto
• 1985/1986 black on white without a boat (21 works)
• 1988/1989 domino series
• 1988/1989 Donasi series

Solo exhibitions

• 1972 UCC House Berlin
• 1973 Contra Club Galerie Bonn,
• 1973 Studio Brescia
• 1977 Offenbacher Kunstkabinett Behr & Trafz
• 1981 house on Lützowplatz, Berlin
• 1987 Galerie Adlung & Kaise, Berlin
• 1989 Michael Schulz Gallery, Berlin
• 2010 Michael Schulz Gallery, Berlin "Losito 70"

literature

• H. Kotschenreuther: Catalog, Galerie Hammer, Berlin 1972.
• Felice Denzer: Catalog, Studio Brescia, 1973.
• Lucie Schauer: Catalog 1st May Salon. House on Lützowplatz, Berlin, 1977.
• Catalog, Berlin May 1st Salon. House on Lützowplatz, Berlin, 1980.
• Gerd Winkler: The connector on the art-culture ladder. In: Art Report. No. 2, 1976.
• Artificial weather. Supplement to Pardon magazine , 1977.
• Artificial weather. Sorry, 1978.
• Rooms of the future. In: Art Report. 1978.
• Heinz Ohff: Optimism and black ribbon. Catalog foreword to the illustrations for Voltaire's Candid , Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin 1981.

Web links

• The Losito Kressmann Zschach Foundation
• Exhibition catalog Losito seventy. Gallery schultz contemporary berlin, 2010 (PDF)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Burkhart Veigel : Paths through the wall. Series Edition Berlin Underworld . Ch. Link, Berlin 2015.