Mario Fallani was an Italian artist who, as others in the second part of the 20th C, made the path from figuration to abstraction the other way round. He was born in Florence in 1934 and was only 24 when he painted the abstract composition in our collection, a unique piece that dates to 1958.
The influence of American abstract expressionism, Pollock and action painting, is clear in this painting as it is in many other works by Fallani’s contemporaries, experimenting with abstract art in the first decades after the Second World War. The impetuous style and the aesthetics, peculiar and avant-garde at the time, are still very popular in contemporary art today. Fallani’s painting shifted slowly to figuration with his works dating from the 70s onwards being often lyrical still lifes and dream like landscapes. The US became then Fallani’s home, he moved there after having lived in Germany and North of Europe, and he taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
In 1976 Fallani worked at the scenography of ‘Il Casanova’ by Federico Fellini, with the Italian director being reported as a big collector of his artworks.
In 2005 an important exhibition of his works was organised at the Museo Marini in Florence. In 2011 a large work measuring 4 x 2.5 meters was exhibited in the Italian Pavillon of the Venice Biennale.
