Carmelo Cappello

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Name Carmelo

Surname Cappello

Country Italia

Bio

Carmello Cappello was born in Ragusa in 1912. In 1929, after studying at the Comiso Istituto d’Arte, he moved to Rome where he spent a year working in the studio of Ettore Colla. The next year he transferred to Milan where he attended evening classes at Castello Sforzesco. A scholarship enabled him to study under Marino Marini at the Monza Istituto Superiore d’Arte. Among the works shown at his first exhibitions in Rome and Milan in the late thirties was Il freddoloso. The critical texts for these shows were written by Raffaelo Gioli. In 1940 his sculpture Contemplazione was shown at the Venice Biennale.
He formed a cordial friendship with Giò Ponte who introduced his work at the Meridiana Gallery in Milan. His sculpture Bagnante was shown at the 4th Rome Quadriennale and in 1946 he was invited to participate in the exhibition of contemporary Italian art in the modern art museums of San Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. In 1947 he was awarded the Matteotti prize. Three years later he took part in the exhibition “Italienische Kunst der Gegenwart” which travelled to the museums of Munich, Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg. That same year I figli della luna, a sculpture in pink Verona marble was shown at the 25th Venice Biennale and acquired for the Rome Galleria d’Arte Moderna. In 1956 he had a show in France at St Paul de Vence. During the sixties he took part in numerous shows in Italy and abroad, venues including the MadridAthenaeum and the Paris Rodin Museum.
Over the next thirty years he continued to show his work. Monuments realised for public spaces included the steel fountain at the beginning of the Messina-Palermo motorway. In 1990, fifty years after his works were first exhibited at the Galleria Gian Ferrari in Milan, a cycle of his figurative works from the ‘30s and ‘40s were shown again. In 1994 the Museo Cappello was inaugurated in his birthplace Ragusa. The works, which were donated by the artist, are accompanied by a monograph edited by Enrico Crispolti.