Mario Comensoli

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Mario Comensoli in his studio (Photo Sonya Robbiani)

Mario Pasquale Comensoli (born April 15, 1922 in Lugano ; † June 2, 1993 in Zurich ) was a Swiss painter of realism .

Life

Mario Comensoli (1922–1993) painter and graphic artist. Plastic. Socially critical motives. Helene Comensoli (1914–1994) grave inscription, Dove sei tu, li sonoio, grave in the Witikon cemetery, Zurich
Grave in the Sihlfeld cemetery

Mario Comensoli came from an Italian emigrant family and grew up in Molino Nuovo . After his school days, he got by with odd jobs and selling portraits and landscapes to tourists . In 1943 the Municipal Art Museum (Museo civico di belle arti) in Lugano bought his landscape painting Piccolo Paesaggio . Comensoli received a scholarship from the Fondazione Torricelli , which allowed him to attend courses at the Zurich School of Applied Arts and lectures at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich . In 1944 he met Hélène Frei († 1994) and later married her in Basel . During his stays in Paris , Comensoli made the acquaintance of Joan Miró , Pablo Picasso , Fernand Léger and the brothers Alberto and Diego Giacometti .

In 1953, Mario Comensoli exhibited 65 works of art as a guest of the Zurich Art Society in the Zurich Helmhaus. The oil paintings, drawings and sculptures essentially summarized his experiences in Paris. Critics valued his post-Cubist works, but Comensoli changed his style due to a polemic attack in the Paris weekly Les lettres françaises and under the influence of some left-wing intellectuals. This is how Comensoli's picture cycle Lavoratori in blu , workers in blue , was created, a series of oil paintings that always focused on the craftsmen of the south, who emigrated to Switzerland in the 1950s in search of work and which the painters in blue work clothes and in everyday situations.

Advised by the writers Carlo Levi and Saverio Strati , Comensoli brought his paintings to Rome, where he clashed in the “Galleria San Luca” with the painter Renato Guttuso , master of socialist realism in Italy. Guttuso accused him of a lack of political vision and the less elegiac character of his characters. However, Comensoli did not want to be a political painter. His concern was to show the poetry of the marginal figures of society, for him they were the new aesthetic. In 1970, Italian emigrants in Switzerland presented him with the “Nicolao della Flüe” award for the solidarity aspects of his works, an award that he received together with Max Frisch and director Alexander Seiler. In those years Comensoli's painting, always strictly figurative and indifferent to the dominant dictates of the “Constructivists” on Zurich soil, treated the characteristic themes of the 68 protests with stylistic influences inspired by Pop Art .

The last turning point in the work of Mario Comensoli occurred at the beginning of the 80s when the artist, who closely observed the world of alternatives, the scenes of the punks, the "squatters" and the drug addicts, which the so-called "needle park" behind the Zurich State Museum populated, portrayed relentlessly. The results were bitter, marked by deep existential participation. Among other things, it was these pictures of the “No Future Generation” that were shown to an international audience in the 1989 exhibition in honor of Comensoli at the Zurich Kunsthaus. Mario Comensoli died on June 2, 1993 at the age of 71 of a heart attack in his Zurich studio on Rousseaustrasse.

Comensolis picture cycles

  • 1949–1951 cyclist
  • 1957–1960 Blue Period or Lavoratori in blue
  • 1962–1969 encounters
  • 1968–1978 Pop Art
  • 1979– 1983 disco scene
  • 1983–1987 Young people in motion

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1953 Helmhaus in Zurich
  • 1974 Villa Malpensata in Lugano
  • 1986 Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau
  • 1989 Kunsthaus in Zurich

Posthumous exhibitions (selection)

  • 1998 Museo d'Arte Moderna in Lugano
  • 2002 Fondazione Mazzotta in Milan
  • 2003 Museo Cà la Ghironda in Bologna
  • 2006 Palais de Beaulieu in Lausanne
  • 2008 Pinacoteca Casa Rusca in Locarno
  • 2009 Welti modern art in Zurich
  • 2010 PressArt-Museum der Moderne in Salzburg
  • 2011 Cinema Comensoli Vip Pavilion in the Zurich Film Festival
  • 2014 Museo Civico Villa dei Cedri in Bellinzona
  • 2014 Collezione Artrust in Melano (Lugano)
  • 2017/18 Bern Historical Museum "1968 Switzerland" in Bern
  • 2018 Ludwig Forum "Flashes of the Future" in Aachen  
  • 2018 Kunstmuseum Olten "Life is not a pony farm" in Olten
  • 2019 National Museum Zurich "History of Switzerland" in Zurich  

literature

  • Comensoli, Mario . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists of the XX. Century. tape 1 : A-D . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1953.
  • Association for the publication of the Swiss artists 'lexicon (ed.): Artists' dictionary of Switzerland XX. Century. Volume 1, Huber, Frauenfeld 1958, p.?.
  • Swiss Institute for Art Research, Zurich and Lausanne (ed.): Biographical Lexicon of Swiss Art. Dictionnaire biographique de l'art suisse. Dizionario biografico dell'arte svizzera. Verlag Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zurich 1998, Volume 1, pp.?.
  • The painter and his gallery owner: Mario Comensoli. G. Maecenas-Verlag Zug, Baar 1996, ISBN 3-907048-08-3 .
  • Aurel Schmidt, Christine Seiler: Mario Comensoli - encounters and memories. Versus Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-909066-00-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ comensoli / Mario Comensoli (Italian)
personal data
SURNAME Comensoli, Mario
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Comensoli, Mario Pasquale (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss painter of realism
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Lugano
DATE OF DEATH 2nd June 1993
Place of death Zurich