Exhibition of the Graphic works of
    Ugo NESPOLO    

and

ARCHEOLOGY and TOWN-PLANNING

Exhibition by the "Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi"
(University of Turin)
(date to be decided)

 l’Etoile square,  Assicurazioni Generali building, Beirut.

Inaugurazione della Mostra delle Opere Grafiche di Ugo NESPOLO e dei Pannelli Archeologici del Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi dell’Università di Torino.

Ugo Nespollo, born at Massa Santa Maria near Biella on August 29, 1941, studied under Enrico Paulucci at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti from where he emerged with a degree in Modern Literature having produced a graduate thesis on Semiology. His career as an artist dates back to the Sixties, the era of Italian Pop Art and the cradle of its future conceptual and Arte Povera movements. During those early days, his work was shown in Remo Pastori's il Punto Gallery in Turin and the Galleria Schwartz in Milan. Never a fully fledged member of any particular movement, he has always adopted a distinctly ironical and transgressive stance with a highly personal sense of him that has become his trademark. 

Nespolo's career took a major step forward in the Seventies.
In 1974 he won the Bolaffi Award; in 1975-76 he created
The Museum, a painting 10 meters long that marked the start of a still unfinished exploration (review analysis - reinvention) of other artists' work. The Museum went on show for the first time in 1976 at Livorno's Museo Progressivo d'Arte Contemporanea. The Eighties were the core of his American period. Nespolo spent part of the year in New York and made its streets, shop windows and hamburger cooks the protagonists of his paintings. This was also the period of Ugo Nespolo's venture into the field of the applied arts. Loyal to the old Avant Garde precept that "art needs to be taken into life", he is convinced that the contemporary artist is under an obligation to escape from the prison house of late Romantic cliché.  

In 1990 Milan's Palazzo Reale presented another major exhibition of Nespolo's work. In that year, he also did prestigious work for clients like the Campari advertising campaign, the sets and costumes for Paisiello's Don Chisciotte at Rome's Teatro dell'Opera. He also had an exhibition of ceramics, his new interest, at the International Biennial of Ceramics and Antiques held in Faenza's Exhibition Center.  

In April 1997, the Valletta Museum of Fine Arts in Malta devoted an exhibition to Nespolo's work. Meanwhile a traveling exhibition of his work opened in Buenos Aires (Museo Nocional de Bellas Artes) went on to Cordoba (Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Cordoba, Chateau Carreras) and then to Montevideo (Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales).