Lamberto Pignotti

born in 1926 in Florence.  

Here he graduated and resided until 1968, when he moved to Rome. In 1944, having assimilated the lessons of the avant-gardes, he started experimenting with verbal-visual art. In the mid-fifties he began his non-fiction activity, deliberately aimed at militant criticism and cultural current events. For these sectors he regularly collaborates with articles and essays in newspapers and periodicals of national interest, in RAI programs, in various Italian and foreign magazines. In the early 1960s he conceived and theorized the first forms of "technological poetry" and "visual poetry", of which he edited the first anthology in 1965, identifying 15 authors. In 1963 he created the "Gruppo 70" with Miccini, Chiari and other artists and critics and took part in the formation of the "Gruppo 63" a few months later. Since 1971 he has carried out, first as a professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Florence and then at the DAMS of the Faculty of Arts in Bologna, courses on the various relationships between avant-garde, mass-media and new-media. His artistic work proceeds by relating signs and codes of different origins: linguistic, visual, hearing, taste, smell, touch, behavior, entertainment: from this multimedia and synaesthetic activity are born, between happening and performance, the "Poems and no", the "cine-poems", the logo-musical cassettes, the books made of plastic, the poems to touch, to drink, to eat, the "chewing poems" and, of course, the "visual poems ”In the form of a collage or an intervention on news, fashion and advertising photos.

The staging of various anthological or thematic personal exhibitions is flanked by a more intense presence in collective exhibitions all over the world such as the Venice Biennale, the Rome Quadriennale, the New York Avant-garde Festival, the San Paolo Biennale, and in museums and public spaces in London, Tokyo, Toronto, Beijing, Warsaw, Oslo, Madrid, Sidney, Paris, Cologne, Buenos Aires, Millwaukee, Florence, Mantua, Spoleto, Verona, Milan, Prato, Bologna, Siena, Palermo, Naples, Rome, Turin, Genoa, Venice.