Patrick Lo Giudice

Patrick Lo Giudice (born August 20, 1959 in Zurich ) is a Swiss artist of Italian origin who specializes in painting , collage , photography and encaustic . He became known to a wider public for the first time through the cycle "The Lo Giudice Code", which is controversial because of the motif, wax paintings based on photographs of famous Mafia murders .

Life

Lo Giudice lived in Graniti , Sicily ( Taormina ) for three years . During stays in Italy, the traumatic experience occurred that Lo Giudice would later process in his Mafia pictures: while his father was talking to a timber dealer, the boy waiting for him was walking along a row of parked cars and reading up to pass the time whose speedometers show the specified maximum speeds. Suddenly the child came to a car whose speedometer could not be read. At second glance, Lo Giudice noticed that the numbers were hidden by a corpse, a murder victim of the Mafia. They left without notifying the police, and allegedly they weren't even allowed to talk to close family members about their experiences, as the mafia had a lot of influence in the region. Nevertheless, Lo Giudice's father, a staunch supporter of communist / socialist ideas, always refused to pay the protection fee for his woodworking company. When an incendiary bomb was found that was aimed at the carpenter's shop (in which many liters of flammable varnish were stored) but did not detonate, it was decided to settle in Switzerland. (The first artistic work was done in Italy: In 1973 a fresco was created in the Orfanotrofio Antoniano monastery .)

In Switzerland, he trained as a dental technician in Winterthur . In 1977 he made his first oil paintings, in 1983 he had his first creative encounter with glass, Lo Giudice learned lead glass from John Forbes (USA). From 1985 to 1988 various stays with glassblowers and artists in Murano , Venice followed . 1993 first attempts with polycarbonate as a material, 1996 with wax (encaustic). In the years 2002/2003 Lo Giudice exhibited in the Kunsthaus Glarus , in the course of the exhibition "Artists from the Linth area ", in the "Museum Amden " ( Canton St. Gallen ), as well as in the "Galerie Marie-Louise Wirth ", Hochfelden , in which the pictures of the Freiämter writer Silvio Blatter could already be seen. In 2004 Lo Giudice's "Encaustic paintings" were in the Andy Jllien Gallery , Zurich . In 2005 he took part in the “Art Reading” project in Herrliberg-Feldmeilen . In 2006 he exhibited again with Andy Jllien, this time the series " Mafia " ( Cosa Nostra ). He was also at "art felchlin - contemporary art".

Mainly through the controversial Mafia images, Lo Giudice gained a wider audience via television (including appearance in Kurt Aeschbacher's talk show on SF 1 ) and the press.

Web links

• Official website