Fabio Mauri

Post-war Italian artist Fabio Mauri’s practice encompasses performance, film, installation, found-object sculpture, mixed media works and theoretical writings to question readings of history and the associated power of language and ideology associated with the Second World War and the Holocaust. Sobering, direct, and poetically reflective, Mauri’s art addresses themes of communication and manipulation, and brings light to the ‘political dimension of the image,’ as it is projected and proliferated throughout contemporary society.Born in Rome in 1926, Mauri’s youth was marked by the events of war and Fascism—traumas and horrors that would profoundly impact and influence his life and work. Raised among writers and painters, Mauri befriended intellectuals in Italy’s new avant-garde, among them the novelist Italo Calvino, philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco, film director and aficionado Pier Paolo Pasolini, visual artist Jannis Kounellis, art historian Maurizio Calvesi and the writer Edoardo Sanguineti. ‘I patiently recompose,’ the artist commented, ‘with my own hands, the experience of the shameful. I explore its mental possibilities… I behave as if that reality (that history) had not had its final condemnation, but were still adding further data right up to our time today.’