Giuseppe Zigaina

Biography

Giuseppe Zigaina was born in Cervignano del Friuli on the 2nd April 1923. From 1935 to 1943 he attends the boarding school in Tolmino (today in Slovenia) and graduates in Art in Venice. In 1946 he meets Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom he forges a strong friendship, that will last until the death of the poet. Two years later he has his first exhibition at Il Cavallino Gallery in Venice and participates at the Venice Biennale for the first time, an exhibition to which he is invited a further eight times during his career. Towards the end of the 1940s he associates with Renato Guttuso, Armando Pizzinato, Ernesto Treccani and Raffaele De Grada. Together with them he elaborates the basic theories of the realism movement, of which he affirms himself to be a critical exponent. His representations of workers and labourers of the Friuli and Veneto countryside, depicted with their work tools on carts and bicycles, are unanimously considered to be one of the high points of the Italian neo-realism movement.

Towards the end of the 1950s the Italian neo-realism movement reaches its end, in painting as well as in literature and cinema. Zigaina abandons the themes of peasant life to consider aspects of industrial society, depicted in muted pessimistic tones. Starting from the 1970s with the series of the Generals he starts to distance himself from the rules of figurative art to fulfill his definitive passage to the informal, in Anatomie, Farfalle, i colli di Redipuglia, i Paesaggi.

The collaboration with Pier Paolo Pasolini is very intense: in 1949 he completes thirteen drawings for the volume Dov’è la mia patria [Where is my Homeland?], in 1968 he executes sketches for the stage sets of the film Theorem (also in that year for Sergei Prokofiev’s The Gambler and for the Teatro dell’ Opera in Rome) and in 1971 he plays the part of the holy friar in the film The Decameron.

Towards the end of the 1970s he starts to develop his personal theory of the death/language of the poet, that obtains significant recognition in Italy and abroad. In 1984 he holds his first lectures on the death of Pasolini at the University of Berkeley and for a brief period teaches at the Art Institute of San Francisco. A few years later he publishes a series of essays on the subject, some of which are translated into English and German: Pasolini e la morte, mito, alchimia e semantica del nulla lucente [Pasolini and death, myth, alchemy and semantics] (Marsilio, 1987), Pasolini tra enigma e profezia [Pasolini between enigma and prophecy] (1989), Pasolini e l’abiura. Il segno vivente e il poeta morto [Pasolini and abjuration. The living sign and the dead poet] (1993), Hostia. Trilogia della morte di Pier Paolo Pasolini [Trilogy of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini] (1995), Pasolini. Un idea di stile: uno stile! [Pasolini. An idea of style: A style!] (1999), Temi e treni di Pier Paolo Pasolini [Themes and trains of Pier Paolo Pasolini] (2000), Pasolini, la ricerca e il gioco [Pasolini, the search and the game] (2002), Pasolini e il suo nuovo teatro [Pasolini and his new theatre] (2003).

Zigaina publishes two collections of autobiographical stories, again for Marsilio, entitled Presso la laguna [At the Lagoon] (1995) and Mio padre l’ariete [My father the Ram] (2001).

He receives numerous awards and much recognition during the course of his career. His works are found in the most famous Italian museums and in numerous international institutions. Eminent art historians such as Marco Valsecchi, Marcello Venturoli, Mario De Micheli, Giovanni Carandente, Giuseppe Marchiori, Carlo Pirovano, Carlo Giulio Argan dedicate countless studies to him.

He dies in Palmanova in 2015 at the age of 91.