The next Artist You Need To Know is Domenico Gnoli (1933 – 1970).
Domenico Gnoli was an Italian artist born in 1933 in Rome, Italy, who worked in both painting and stage design. Gnoli’s artworks straddled the space between Pop Art and Hyperrealism, though contemporary critics found him resistant to easy classification. His works were also shown not just in gallery spaces but also in many print publications of his time, reaching variant audiences that only added to the wider interpretations of his work.
“I was born knowing that I would be a painter. […] My themes come from the world around me, familiar situations, everyday life; because I never actively mediate against the object, I experience the magic of its presence.”
Gnoli’s family offered him a fine environment that nurtured his artistic nature : his mother was the ceramicist Annie de Garrou and his father Umberto Gnoli was an art historian and superintendent of arts in Umbria. His grandfather was a poet and historian and when Domenico Gnoli was born (in Rome in 1933) he was named after this same grandfather. His family – especially his father – encouraged Gnoli’s early interest in drawing and painting.
He studied stage design at the Accademia di Belle Arti : for a brief period early in his career he worked in this field with a degree of success, but Gnoli would relocate to Paris In 1953 and two years later moved to New York City in the United States where he spent the majority of his life. Gnoli is best known for the work he did in the US (though he did travel widely during this period, while retaining NYC as his base), working with a variety of magazines and print publications from Sports Illustrated to Fortune (he often collaborated with art director Leo Lionni).
“I always employ simple, given elements, I don’t want either to add or take anything away. I have never even wanted to deform; I isolate and represent.”
Daniella Luxembourg (of the gallery Luxembourg & Dayan which mounted an extensive retr of Gnoli’s work several years ago) offers that “There is always an invisible presence in his paintings. It’s never the object itself.”
Domenico Gnoli’s career was cut harshly short when he passed away in 1970 from cancer when he was only 35. He was a very prolific artist during his brief life, and many more of his works can be seen here.
The majority of Gnoli’s paintings are not in public institutions but are owned primarily by private collectors. But Gnoli’s works have been shown (both during his life and posthumously) in a number of important spaces including the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (MUMOK), the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and Museum Kunstpalast.
In 1960, a review of an exhibition of his work in The New York Times offered that Domenico Gnoli “has a gift for endowing inanimate objects with a strangely moving feeling, a gift that is essentially dramatic and far removed from the common place character of his subject matter.”