Ettore Spalletti (Cappelle sul Tavo, 1940 - Spoltore, 2019) is an Italian painter and sculptor currently among the most famous and best quoted Italian Contemporary artist.
Ascribable to the Minimal tendency, his research has focused since the late 1960s on the essentiality of the monochrome - applied on wood, marble or metal sculptures - which wants to reconfigure the light and color of the environment in which it is inserted. He began his career when Arte Povera was revolutionizing visual culture in Italy and beyond. Spalletti developed a singular, solitary voice and a resultant body of work that exceeds any movement that circumscribes an artist to regional or ideological boundaries. Spalletti’s formal vocabulary has always melded and balanced painting and sculpture, form and color, interior and exterior space.
Each work is the result of a meditative but rigorous process of applying a layer of color at the same time of each day, to capture a specific tone that recalls an hour, a season, and the weather. The pigment is applied on the whole surface of the work, to be finely manipulated by the artist with a light movement, which breaks the monotony of pure color and relates to the light, to the space in which the work is inserted.
In 1996 he took part in a Public Art project in reinterpretating the space of the morgue at the Raymond Pointcaré hospital in Garches, near Paris (Salle des Départs, 1996): the five rooms are repainted in a pale blue and the objects in his interior, made of black and white marble, are arranged on slightly rounded and not orthogonal lines that contradict the maximum simplicity of the proposed shapes; the result is an environment of limpid serenity which succeeds in the extremely difficult aim of "humanizing" that place.
Spalletti participates in important international exhibitions such as Documenta in Kassel and the Rome Quadrennial; he won the first prize for painting at the 1948 Venice Biennial and he represented Italy in the 1997 edition. Spalletti has participated in the Venice Biennale (1982, 1993, 1995 and 1997) and Documenta VII (1982), Documenta IX (1992).
The most important solo exhibitions include those hosted at MoMA (2000) and at the Guggenheim (1993) in New York, at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1991), at the Henry Moore Foundation (2005) and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome (2010). The major retrospective of the artist "Un giorno così bianco, così bianco" was conceived and hosted in 2014 at the same time in the spaces of GAM in Turin, MAXXI in Rome and MADRE in Naples. Spalletti has been the subject of major international exhibitions over the last 40 years, most recently at the Galleria Nazionale d'arte moderna e contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2021); Nouveau Musee National d Monaco, Monaco, France (2019); Palazzo Cini, Venice (2015). Other notable solo exhibitions include Académie de France, Villa Medici, Rome (2006); Castello di Rivoli - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli, Turin (2004); Fundación la Caixa, Madrid (2000); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg (1998); MUHKA – Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (1995); and Museum Folkwang, Essen (1982). His major commission works include the chapel at Villa Serena, Pescara, Italy in collaboration with the architect Patrizia Leonelli and La salle des départs at Hôpital Raymond-Poincaré, Garches, France.
In 2014-2015 Franco and Roberta Calarota, founders of Galleria d'Arte Maggiore G.A.M. dedicated in the historic headquarters in Bologna an exhibition to artist entitled Giorgio Morandi. Ettore Spalletti. Dialogo di Luce / Dialogue of light (Silvana Editoriale, 2014): the installation was curated by Ettore Spalletti himself, giving life more to an installation than a simple exhibition.