Gianpaolo Berto

Portrait of a Woman - Etching Plate by Gianpaolo Berto - 1974

1970s

Gian Paolo Berto born and raised in the limited but fervent artistic environment of Adria after the war where, apart from the isolated and not yet rediscovered genius of the Anglo-Saxon Foster, a new cultural climate was forming alongside the figures of Scarpari, Reali, Rizzi, Palmieri , Gioli. Then in Rovigo, he is studying with Prudenziato and Breseghello and in friendship with Gabbris Ferrari. The meeting with the masters Zancanaro and Levi is dazzling and constitutes the springboard of this eclectic artist in the world of contemporary Italian painting. Despite having been among the very few admitted to De Chirico's studio (but also by Guttuso and Picasso), and has exhibited in prestigious galleries and museums, Berto has always exempted himself from appearing in the windows of the great art market, preferring contact, in an anti-elitist key, with the most genuine audiences: students, simple people, artists and intellectuals who conduct their research with rigor and autonomy from fashions and trends. This does not mean that his painting is detached from the context of contemporary art. Indeed, the painter's characteristic appropriation of the reality that surrounds him and the evolving forms of painting in Berto is explicit and, as often happens in art, prophecy. The debt contracted by American Pop towards the European one is known: a front that at the time found an attentive and operative Berto and then, in the following decades, ready to grasp the flourishing of the successive frontiers of art.