BIOGRAPHY

The beginnings

The sculptor Mauro Baldessari was born in Rovereto, Trento Province, on July 21, 1942. He started his training first in Trento, where he learned the technique of wood carving. In 1960 he moved to Milan, where he worked at the studios of the artists F. Mina and M. Buttafava. He later graduated from the Artistic High School "Beato Angelico" where, a few years later, he taught nude and sculpture. In the mid-1960s he led an important experience in Burundi where he taught and founded an art high school that is still operational. During his six-year stay in Africa he made numerous sculptures and decorated six churches with large pictorial series. Upon returning to Milan, he combined his work as a sculptor with his profession as a teacher until 1980. The African experience particularly influenced the sculptures of this early period both in terms of subjects (The Game, The Harp Player, In the Name of Love...) and the type of figuration.

Abstraction and figuration

Subsequently, for Mauro Baldessari figuration or abstraction would be two possible ways to operate, even simultaneously, in relation to subject and context. However, they always both presented energy, gestures and spatial dynamics, both interior and exterior.

From the 1980s onward and up to the present, his research addresses, running through both modes of expression, certain recurring themes such as the body, sensuality, and feeling.

Sculpture became an opportunity to meditate on the processes and dynamics of reality, generating some abstract series such as: Nascita del Pensiero, the result of attending the Center for the Study of Experimental Psychology (Centro Assenza) for thirteen years and Pensando a... a series of portraits generated by the physical absence of the subject but by his or her presence as "unconscious memory" and Research conducted in the 1990s with writings, drawings and sculptures towards a NEW FIGURATION

Commissioned Artwork

Motivated by his training as a teacher and his African experience of art lived as genuinely communal, he distanced himself more and more, beginning in the 1980s, from an idea of artistic production that was distant and isolated from the social context. He therefore abandoned the world of exhibitions and competitions and made himself available to commissioned artwork and its dynamics: listening to the client and his/her needs, listening to the object to be made and to the environment in which the work would be placed.

The idea of sculpture-making as "putting oneself at the service of" sees its full implementation in the active involvement of the communities in designing the works of art, as was the case when he collaborated with the Brigidine Sisters for the works of their mother house or with the Italian community of Bolzano for the realization of the portal of the Church of St. G. Bosco. In Italy he creates sculptural works - statues, monuments and panels in high and low relief - for numerous religious institutes: Jesuits, Canossian Sisters, Fatebenefratelli, Camillian Sisters, Brigidine Sisters, Hospitaller Sisters, Teresian Carmelite Sisters, Capuchins, Don Orione, Little Sisters of the Holy Family.

The last ten years are characterized by an important collaboration with the Salesian Institute in Turin for which he created works in Italy and around the world.  Such collaborations often transcend the realization of an isolated work and instead concern the total reorganization of the interior and exterior areas of buildings of worship for which he not only conceives the sacred furnishings (as for the San Giovanni Rotondo Shrine), but he also designs solutions of the "sense" regarding the rethinking of liturgical functions within the buildings (the Church of Maria Auxiliadora in Cordoba, Argentina, and the Marian Shrine of Better Living in the Philippines, both redesigned in recent years for the Salesians). His clients also include municipalities, provinces, regions, universities, banks, companies and some private individuals. In Trentino, for example, he executed two large sculpture series for the Federation of Trentino Cooperatives and the Sait Cooperative.

Medals

In the line of medals, by producing almost a thousand models and using his strongly sculptural style, he has revolutionized the style and approach of this sector in Italy and abroad, being the first to introduce the "blurred background," a fusion of a subject and the background in a sculpture.  Those to be mentioned for their beauty, originality and prestige, are the medals dedicated to Paganini, Stradivari, G.Mendel, A. Degasperi, Manzoni, the Municipality of Melegnano (MI), the travels of Pope John Paul II, the University of Padua and the Jubilee Year 2000; all made on the occasion of the most important religious and civil events: anniversaries, commemorations, canonizations...

Portraits

For him, portraits are special situations of expression. With more than three hundred portraits, all marked by a strong psychological connotation, he ranges from the classic half-length to complex compositions that contextualize the subject.

Material

Having been trained in wood carving, initially this was the material he preferred in making sculptures, shaping them with distinct designs. He progressively began working with marble, terracotta, bronze, Murano glass, stainless steel and Plexiglas. His knowledge of these materials allows him to combine them at times in complex and free sculptures.

Research

His sculpture-making is supported and flanked by a continuous search with psychological, philosophical, expressive or more overall human implications. This has enhanced his sculpture-making by characterizing its approach and enriching it with a particularly intense and rigorous method, made up of both a true deep participation in the subject matter dealt with and a significant essential nature.

Studies

For the past fifty years he has worked in the courtyard at 14 Mac Mahon Street, a suburb of small brick buildings immersed in the countryside, once the mill of the Renaissance Villa Simonetta that went on to become the "sculptors' courtyard" since the early Twentieth Century.  Not far from the Monumental Cemetery, the courtyard was home to marble workers and decorators who worked for big names such as Andrea Cascella, Cappello, and Manzù. Nowadays the courtyard is dedicated to new purposes and Mauro Baldessari has remained the only one to carry on and renew this ancient tradition of sculpture.