Nino Giuffrida Art

Nino Giuffrida (Sicilian, 1924, active in France) Un Garçon avec des Fruits • Oil on canvas, ca. 41 x 33 cm • Frame, made by the renowned framer Knöll from Zürich, ca. 54 x 46 cm • Signed top left Born in 1924 in Sicily, Nino already attended the artistic high school in Catania at the age of 17, where he befriended fellow painters including Pippo Aleo and Giovanni Calogero. At that time, he painted with passion everything he saw, landscapes, seascapes, still lifes. After a first attempt to come to France with his friend Giovanni in 1948, aborted for lack of a visa. Nino finally arrived at the Gare de Lyon on December 8, 1949 and settled at number 30 rue Gabrielle in Montmartre. Nino began to paint Paris. Like many Montmartre artists of this period, while he painted all day long, he moved about in the evening on the terraces of the cafés of Montmartre and Saint-Germain-des-Prés to transform himself into a portrait painter and randomly sketch the customers in restaurants. Nino then devoted himself more and more to the painting of children, which became his favorite theme of inspiration. Pierre Imbourg, journalist and art critic, wrote of him: "Montmartre, the land of little ‘Poulbots’, inspiring Nino to record in his mind all these childrens faces whose intense facial expression he would endevour to reproduce". It was also at this time that his career as a Montmartre painter influenced by cubism began. With the disappearance of the art galleries in Montmartre, Nino decides to settle on the French Riviera, in Cannes then in Vallauris. From 1952 his personal exhibitions follow one another and Nino becomes an international painter: Rome, Brussels, Chicago, Copenhagen, Helsingborg and Aüs in Sweden, in Geneva, in Kourou in Guyana... In Paris, he manages the Galerie de la Colonne...