Giuseppe Banchieri was born in Milan in 1927 and moved to Florence with his family when he was a child. There, he attended the high school, where one of his teachers was the philosopher and Renaissance historian Eugenio Garin. At the end of the Second World War he moved back to Milan where he attended the ‘Accademia di belle Arti di Brera’; at the time Aldo Carpi was the school director and one of his teachers.
In 1956 his first solo exhibition was held at Gallery Pater in Milan with Mario De Micheli curating the show. The following year Banchieri was awarded the San Fedele prize. The 1958 and 1962 Venice Biennale, as well as the 1959, 1965, 1972 Rome Quadriennale, are amongst the countless International exhibitions he took part to. Banchieri has been part of the ‘Realismo esistenziale’ group, which was started in the mid 1950s by Mino Ceretti, Giuseppe Guerreschi and Bepi Romagnoni, who all had Aldo Carpi and Francesco Messina as teachers at Brera.
‘Realisimo esistenziale’ can be seen as a reaction to Informalism, with the artists belonging to the group sharing the research about existence as a theme of their works and a rejection to authoritarianism and political and social conformism as basis of their ideology.
In the foreword to a catalogue of a solo exhibition held at the galleria Trentadue in Milan in 1985, Roberto Tassi wrote about the window as a recurring theme in Banchieri’s works. ‘The window, place of ambiguity, is a recurring element in Banchieri’s works. The window is the point of separation, and contact, between reality and appearance, between a desire and its accomplishment, between life and dream, between real and imaginative time.’
