Mario Negri

Biography

Mario Negri was born in 1916 in Tirano, in the province of Sondrio. After graduating from the Fine Arts Academy in Brera, he goes on to attend a two year course in architecture at the polytechnic of Milan, where he comes into contact with the group of artists and intellectuals that gravitate around the publication <Corrente di vita giovanile> and becomes friends with Sandro Cherchi, Italo Valenti and Giacomo Manzù.

Called up in 1940, on the 9th September 1943 he is captured by the Germans at Bressanone. He is deported to the Prisoner of War Camps in Germany and Poland (Deblin-Irena, Oberlangen, Bremervorde, Wietzendorf), and isn’t liberated until 1945.

In the immediate post war years he dedicates himself full-time to sculpture and forms an intense relationship with MAF, one of the oldest art foundries in Lombardy. From 1950 alongside being an artist  he becomes a critic: and a collaborator on the architecture and decorative arts publication <Domus> founded by Gio Ponti in 1928. The following year he marries Elda Magri, a graduate of piano from the Milan Conservatory. There are three daughters from the marriage, Chiara, Marina and Maria Laura.

Towards the end of the 1950s he opens his first important solo exhibition in Italy (Galleria del Milione in Milan in 1957) and abroad (the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York in 1958). During these years he establishes and consolidates more intense human and cultural relationships that are long-lasting and incisive, with Alberto Giacometti, Serafino Corbetta, Cesare Gnudi, Franco Russoli, Luigi Carluccio, Mario Valsecchi, Lamberto Vitali, the young sculptor RudyWach, the collector Han Coray, the painter Edmondo Dobrzanski, the jewellery creator Karl-Heinz Reister and the photographers Paolo Monti and Arno Hammmacher. Together with the architect Mario Tedeschi he curates the “Sculpture in Architecture” exhibition in Sydney.

From the 1960s he establishes his studio in Milan in Via Stoppani and undertakes an intense activity of exhibitions in Italy and abroad. He also produces some major public works, such as Eindhoven Square in The Netherlands, in collaboration with Gio Ponti (1967) and Grande Colonna di Robbia in Poschiavio in Grigione (1970). He holds numerous prestigious roles: member of the consultative artistic commission of the Fine Arts and Permanent Exhibition society of Milan (1974), National Academic of San Luca (1979), member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-arts de Belgique in Brussels (1984), honorary member of the Accademia Linguistica di Belle Arte in Genova (1987).

He dies unexpectedly of a heart attack on the 5th April 1987 in Tirano.