CIRO PALUMBO

Born in Zurich in 1965, the Italian artist Ciro Palumbo starts a career in advertising, first as a graphic designer and then as Art Director. Pursuing his great passion, he begins to paint and has his first exhibition in 1994. He also tries his hand at sculpture, fulfilling a desire to give a three-dimensional shape to the content of his works. He currently lives and works in Turin.

His artistic career is rich and multifaceted following the footsteps of the Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Savinio and getting inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s imagery made of islands, seascapes and cypress trees. He reinvents those foundations with unusual interpretations: his works are full of oneiric and metaphysical symbols and phantasmagorical stages. No reality seems more authentic than the dream Palumbo depicts.

He is not just a painter but a poet who reflects, reacts and composes to unite in metaphors the elusiveness of time and the incommensurability of space, showing his ability to give a closer observation not so much of nature but rather of the imaginative impressions that come from memory. The artworks are about a travel as existential sublimation and a journey within ourselves encouraging us to interpret and perceive archetypal memories and personal reminiscence.

The art of Palumbo is made of considerable pictorial intensity enhanced by the symbolic meaning of the colour and of the sublimation of light. He uses colour as a vibration of the soul which investigates and brings to surface the suggestive perfectibilities of tones, semitones and atonalities that communicate on each other. He offers unexpected and enigmatic visions creating his own personal philosophical view of the human trajectory. His works refers to the theatre: sets, wings, lighting effects, theatrical machinery of improbable baroque origin which display a mysterious nature between real and illusion.

The utopian creations of Ciro Palumbo were exhibited in numerous solo shows in Italy and abroad, especially in Providence (USA) and Bellinzona in Switzerland. He took part of different fairs such as Artexpo New York, Context Art and Art Basel Miami. Some of his works are part of the collection of the Fondazione Credito Bergameso, of the Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna “G. Sciortino” in Monreale, of the MACIST in Biella and of the one of the MACS in Catania. He also participates to the 54th Biennale of Venice where he represents the region of Piedmont.