Luciano Ceschia

Biography

Luciano Ceschia was born on the 4th June 1926 in Tarcento in Friuli. Interred in an Austrian concentration camp, he attends the Liceo Artistico in Venice after the Second World War. From the early 1950s following a visit to Geneva, Basel, Zurich, Paris and the south of France, he dedicates himself to sculpture, in particular ceramics. He constructs a small kiln in the wood shed of his childhood home, from where he produces panels of bas-reliefs, vases and plates, scenes representing country life (battles, hunting and fishing scenes, pub brawls, heads of builders and farmers, animal fights) alternating with mythological themes.

It is with these works that in 1959 he opens his first exhibition outside the region, at the Colonna di Milano Gallery. From 1960 he starts to express a more original artistic language, perfecting ceramic vitrification techniques. The initial realism, with nostalgic connotations heroic and at times fantastical, makes way for particularly dramatic periods, such as those dedicated to the occupation troops, the shootings of partisans, the doors and the gongs of the Hiroshima disaster.

Embedded in the environment of the Friulian culture, he frequently meets Mascherini, Spacal, the three Basaldella brothers – in particular Dino – as well as poets, writers and architects with whom he generates important collaborations.

In 1961 he holds his first solo exhibition abroad at the Interior Decorators News Gallery in New York. The following year he is invited to the 31st International Art Biennale in Venice. In the room dedicated to ceramics he exhibits four works: the sculpture “Grande ucello in parata” [Big bird on parade], the bas-reliefs “Caduta di Icaro” [The Fall of Icarus] and “Per una fucilazione di ostaggi” [For a hostage shooting], and the panel “Grande porta d’Hiroshima” [The Great Door of Hiroshima]. Thanks to this last piece, an imposing vitrified ceramic, he wins the the Ceramic Industry and Commerce prize .

From the mid 1970s he progressively abandons ceramics to experiment with new materials such as stone, wood, synthetic resins and metals. With his definitive passage to the abstract, geometric lines substitute any residue of the figurative: discs, spheres and mandalas, in stone, stainless steel and cast iron, dissected and recomposed in imaginative but balanced ways characteristic of his sculptural work.

At the same time he develops a tendency for monumental pieces, that manifests itself in long vertical lines, totems of different sections, very varied even in the choice of materials (wood and stone, but mainly soldered iron, enamelled and twisted).

A fixed guest at international shows in Yugoslavia, in the 1970s he is invited to the Quadriennale in Rome and various collective exhibitions in Milan, Florence, Krakow and Basel. In the 1980s he holds important solo  exhibitions in Vienna and New York (Main Hall Gallery). In the same years he dedicates himself primarily to the creation of medallions, that are the protagonists of his final exhibition in 1991 in Udine Castle. It is in the same town of Udine that he dies a few months later on 4th November 1991.