The son of poet Alberto Cavaliere and Russian Jewish sculptor Fanny Kaufmann, he is one of the great masters of contemporary art of the second half of the 20th century After a childhood partly conditioned by his father’s anti-fascist activities and anti-Semitic laws, he completed his studies at the Liceo Berchet in Milan and graduated from the Brera Academy, under the guidance of Manzù, Funi and Marino Marini, whom he succeeded to the chair of sculpture
His multifaceted and ever-renewed activity puts head to several cycles of works that investigate and elaborate the relationship of man and artist with nature, with others, with the founding myths of existence and social life
He began his exhibition activity with a group show in 1945, while his first solo show was held at Galleria Colonna in Milan in 1951 After an initial season of figurative realism, 1957-58 saw the birth of the cycle of Forbidden Games, “a metaphor, as Elena Pontiggia writes in the Catalogue of Sculptures, for the relationship between existence and nature, between instinct and thought, between reason and violence,” and he began to deal with the theme of Metamorphoses, which would remain central to all his research In 1960 he set the series of Gustavo B…
‘s Adventures (1961-64), “where sculpture becomes a plastic tale in numerous episodes and realism is transformed into a surreal narrative” (ibid) From 1964, he devoted himself to exploring the theme of vegetations, inspired by Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura He participated several times in the Venice Biennale, along with others in the exhibition Italian Sculptors, in ’56, and with a solo room in 1964 and 1972, when he presented one of his most significant works: The Trials from W Shakespeare’s English Stories, an extraordinary and grandiose installation (7mx10mx10m), currently the property of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Valle Giulia in Rome From 1964, with the exhibition Arbres, the Schwarz Gallery became his gallery of choice In 1970 he won the professorship of sculpture at the Brera Academy, taking over from Marino Marini, whose assistant he was; in the same year he made two environments: Apollo and Daphne and A and Z wait for love Throughout the 1970s he developed and continued the cycle Viva la libertà In 1971 he made with painter Emilio Scanavino, Homage to Latin America, for the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil, although the work was not exhibited because of its explicit denunciation of the desaparecidos In 1973 he presented as part of the 12th Art Biennial at the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp the installation Surroundings, a total avant-garde operation he would work on again for more than a decade Beginning in 1975 he began his long association with Vincenzo Ferrari In the 1980s he perpetuates the mode of large installations, making Paths, “labyrinths,” the Artist writes, “in which I can meet with the eventual visitor/spectator and then both of us lose ourselves within the work itself His are settings that, through intricate and elaborate labyrinths, propose the eternal and ever-changing themes of art-making: memory and time (Memory, 1987; The Trace, 1986; Gardens of Memory, 1988-90, Time, 1987), the classical and modern (The Eternal Laws of Art,1993), the “true” and the “false” , the confrontation between art and life (The Pygmalion, 1986-7) Of note, the large setting dedicated to Giordano Bruno (1989), the series of works on the theme of Orlando Furioso (1993-4), Passato, presente e Pian Cordova, now at MART in Rovereto His last major work, unfinished, is Great Tree, now on display in the cloister of the Milan Conservatory
An artist refractory to any limitation and definition, he has pursued in his work the search for always new forms of expressiveness, with a conceptually innovative use of techniques from the classical tradition as well as from the Dadaist avant-garde, both reinterpreted in the confrontation with a ductile and very modern plurality of materials
