Roberto Crippa Biography
Roberto Crippa (1921 - 1972) was born in Milan in 1921. He studied at the Milanese Brera Academy where he had Aldo Carpi, Achille Funi and Carlo Carrà as classmates. At the beginning, like many young painters of his generation, Roberto Crippa was influenced by neo-cubism. His first solo exhibition was held in Milan, at the Bergamini Gallery in '47. The artist was one of the first in Italy to practice gestural painting, creating skeins of brightly colored "Spirals" between 1948 and 1952. In '48 Crippa was one of the founding members of the "Spatialists" group, organized around Lucio Fontana, whose objective was to seek a new representation of space with absolutely modern technical means. Starting from this same year, Crippa regularly participates in numerous collective exhibitions and particularly in the Venice Biennale.
He later devotes himself to what the artist calls "Collages", that is, he animates the static surface with cut-out shapes of great material thickness. Roberto Crippa plays on the effects of wrinkled or thick materials, such as wood, bark, vegetal elements or on the metallic, smooth and brilliant ones of transparent elements. His research naturally led him towards sculpture starting from '56; he constructs insects and monsters in cut and welded metal volumes that fall within the tradition of Chadwick's works. The artist is interested in movement in space. In parallel with his pictorial and sculptural work, Roberto Crippa also tries his hand at graphics (engravings, lithographs, illustrated books). In the mid-60s, the artist moved towards monochromatic reliefs, created mainly in shades of grey. The artist died suddenly in 1972, victim of a flight accident near Bresso airport. He was 50 years old.
