Turi Simeti Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Turi Simeti (Alcamo, 5 August 1929) is an Italian painter. After his high school studies in Alcamo, in the province of Trapani, Simeti studied law in Palermo, then leaving Sicily to settle in Rome at the end of the fifties. Read the full biography

Turi Simeti Biography

Turi Simeti (Alcamo, 5 August 1929) is an Italian painter. After his high school studies in Alcamo, in the province of Trapani, Simeti studied law in Palermo, then leaving Sicily to settle in Rome at the end of the fifties. In the capital the artist attended the studios of Tano Festa, Mario Schifano, Giulio Turcato, and Alberto Burri. The meeting with Burri changed his life, since through him he discovered the oval; thereafter this relief form became the protagonist of his three-dimensional painting; it gives new visual perceptions, with its monochromatic surface that changes with the changing light. Simeti, gradually detaching himself from the uniformity of the canvas, arrived at the creation of works full of depth and movement. In 1963 he participated in the Figurative Arts Exhibition of Rome and Lazio, in the Termoli Prize and in the Visual Art exhibition held at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, and other important international exhibitions, including Arte Programmata – Aktuel 65 and Weiss auf Weiss in Bern in 1965 and 1966. In 1965 Simeti was invited to exhibit his works in Milan (where he moved in the same year), at Zero Avantgarde, a collective exhibition hosted in Lucio Fontana's studio, which brought together Italian and foreign artists including the German Gruppo Zero, Hans Haacke, Yayoi Kusama, Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani and Dadamaino, Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni. Between 1966 and 1969, as Artist in Residence at the invitation of Fairleigh Dickinson University, he lived for long periods in New York, where he created several works; in the early seventies he held personal exhibitions in Bergamo, Verona, Rottweil, Düsseldorf, Oldenburg, Cologne, Munich, also taking part in some group exhibitions, such as Estensione, in the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua. In the 1980s, stimulated by Ludovico Corrao's passion for art, he created a very linear sculpture for Gibellina, a traventine slab instead of the usual canvas (Impronta, stone slab from 1980), where the artist transferred his geometric plasticism. In 1982 he held a personal exhibition in the Studio Grossetti in Milan and, in the following years, abroad in the Galerie Passmann in Freiburg and the Galerie Wack in Kaiserslautern; in 1983, at the Galerie Maier in Kitzbüehl and the Galerie Ahrens in Koblenz in 1984, the Galerie Paulo Figueiredo de San Paolo and the Galerie 44 in Düsseldorf in 1985, then at the Chicago fair, at the Galerie Apicella in Bonn in 1986 and at the Galerie Monochrome of Aachen in 1987. In the nineties, he exhibited new works in Rio de Janeiro, Biberach, Kaiserslautern, Milan (Vinciana gallery), Bolzano and Trapani, and in 1996 in the Kunstverein of Ludwigsburg and in Erice, with text in the catalog by Marco Meneguzzo. In 1998 he held a solo show at the Galerie Kain in Basel, followed the following year by other exhibitions in Biberach (again in the Uli Lang gallery), Ladenburg, Mannheim, and by participation in the exhibition “Art in Italy in the 70s” at The Salerniana of Erice. In the following years, his personal exhibitions continued uninterruptedly in dozens of Italian and foreign galleries. In October 2014, with his extroflections, Simeti achieved the world record for a 1965 “Bianco”, sold at Sotheby's for 194,500 pounds (approximately 220,000 euros).