TURI SIMETI: PIANISSIMO

Born in Alcamo, in the province of Trapani, Italy, 1929, Turi Simeti's linguistic reduction and radical essentiality saw him become an important proponent of the culture of the ZERO movement. Parallel to this cultural success, his commercial success has continued to grow throughout the years.

Associated with Burri and Fontana at the beginning of his career, Simeti developed his own unique research and practice, which soon saw him widely acclaimed, not only within Italy, but the rest of Europe too, with exhibitions at many prestigious galleries including Galerie M Bochum, Germany, the Bettina Gallery, Switzerland and, notably in 1965, Lucio Fontana's Studio alongside the ZERO avant-garde group including Manzoni, Castellani, and Bonalumi.

Developing his practice from the flat collages of the late 50s and early 60s, to the spatial complexity of his successive works in the 80s, 90s up until the present day, Simeti sees his work as a product of consequential research rather than a uniformed seriality. Whilst it may seem mathematically sequential, his art is evocative instead of notations of a musical composition, his distinctive extroflexed canvases offering a delicate breech of the traditional boundaries of visual art, a welcome intrusion that plays with the Italian order pianissimo upon our eyes.

Although aligned with the ZERO group and the masters of Spatialism from Fontana to Castellani, through to Fabro, Colombo, Alviani and Bonalumi, Simeti's constructive nuances have always been magnificent in their antithetical itinerary: where Fontana slashed into his canvases with taglis, Simeti builds out his canvases, where Burri asks uses the texture of his medium to be expressive, Simeti asks light itself to be the agent of meaning.