Antonio Sanfilippo was born in Partanna, in the Province of Trapani, on 8 December 1923 From 1938, he attended the Liceo Artistico in Palermo, where Guido Ballo was one of his teachers, and Pietro Consagra one of his closest friends; he shared with Consagra an early vocation for sculpture, in which he also made his debut in a group exhibition in Florence In December 1942, however, he enrolled in the painting course at the Fine Arts Academy of Florence, where he was a student of Felice Carena, who guided his first steps in painting He often painted outdoors, as attested to by a permit he requested for this purpose from the military authorities On his return to Partanna, he taught drawing at the Istituto Magistrale
In 1944, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, he made the acquaintance of Carla Accardi; the following year he exhibited at the Teatro Massimo with Guttuso and other young artists, then – still in 1945 – he held his first solo exhibition in the Sicilian capital (with a “limited number of paintings of modest dimensions”, recalled Ugo Attardi)…
In 1946, he joined the Palermo section of the Communist Party Back in Florence, he completed his studies then moved to Rome Although still inspired with youthful idealism (“we are different because we place our sublime art above all the things that are experienced materially “; from a letter of October 1946 to Carla Accardi, who in the meantime was living in her father’s house in Trapani), the clear intention to live painting as an absolute obsession took root in him (“the important thing is that one does not neglect the discipline of thinking about painting for most of the day, without replacing it with other matters”; to Accardi, still in 1946) And the awareness he had just acquired soon turned into an exhortation: “Carla, try to find all necessary peace in work and in trust in tomorrow”
At the end of the year, he made the study trip that had become de rigeur for all, with Accardi, Attardi, Maugeri, Turcato and Consagra The trip gave him a useful insight into the European avant-garde, especially on the painting of the “Jeunes peintres de tradition française” However, he did not appreciate, for the moment, the ideas of the newly born Art Informel, nor those of Concretism
In 1947, he was one of the signatories of the “Forma” manifesto and, having soon left behind his initial Picassoesque and Guttuso-style Post-Cubism, he experimented with the first Neo-Concrete theories, then the abstract ones, to which he would always remain devoted He was convinced that only “in Abstractionism does representation tend to reveal new aspects of things” He took part in all the major exhibitions of the “Forma” Group, in particular those promoted by the Art Club (including Arte astratta in Italia [Abstract Art in Italy] at the Galleria di Roma in 1948, the third exhibition Arte d’Oggi [Art of Today] at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence in 1949 and Arte astratta e concreta in Italia [Abstract and Concrete Art in Italy] at the Galleria Nazionale in Rome in February 1951), which also organised, in June 1948, the exhibition “Accardi, Attardi, Sanfilippo”, the first opportunity he had to present his recent painting to a wider audience In the same year, he exhibited at the V Quadriennale in Rome and at the XXIV Venice Biennale
In January 1951, he and Carla Accardi (whom he married in September 1949) made a second trip to Paris, during which he met Hans Hartung, who was to have a profound influence on his painting, and Alberto Magnelli, with whose work he had already been familiar, at least since 1948; he also ‘rediscovered’ Arp and Kandinsky
From the early 1950s onwards, he held important personal exhibitions in galleries oriented towards new artistic languages, such as the Vetrina di Chiurazzi in Rome, the Libreria Salto in Milan, the Age d’Or in Rome, the Cavallino in Venice, the Schneider, also in Rome, and the Naviglio in Milan In the second half of the decade, his work was increasingly successful (he exhibited, for example, in New York, Osaka, Brussels, Lausanne, Pittsburgh and London),
Brussels, Lausanne, Pittsburgh and London) and received new, important critical acclaim (Marchiori, Vivaldi, Ponente, Serpan and Tapiè, among others, praised him), while his personal exhibitions multiplied After his debut in the historic edition of the Biennale in 1948, he was again present in Venice in 1954, 1964 and 1966 with a vast, important personal room dedicated to him, which definitively confirmed his role as a master of Italian Abstractionism In the meantime, he was regularly invited to the Quadriennale in Rome, as well as – among other prestigious events – to the Premio Graziano, the Lissone, the Michetti and the Golfo della Spezia
The 1960s saw the definitive enshrinement of his painting in Italy and abroad After a brief flirt with the most dramatic, magmatic and dilacerated aspects of Informal painting (evident in a series of vertical paintings dated 1959-60, distinguished by the clash of black and white), the sign, now minute and invaded by different colours, is often enclosed in a large oval at the centre of the composition
This is how the ‘clouds’ and ‘galaxies’ came into being – among the most typical and well-known figures of his painting
Among the most significant exhibitions held were the personal exhibitions at the New Vision Centre Gallery in London in 1961, at the Arco d’Alibert in Rome in 1964, 1966 and 1969, and at the Naviglio in Milan in 1965 He also exhibited in Chicago, Boston, Paris, Bern, Turin, Bari, Bologna and Florence; while the number of renowned historians and critics writing about his work increased substantially: these included Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Marisa Volpi Orlandini and Giovanni Accame; as well as his first exegetes, in particular, Ponente and Vivaldi
In 1971 he held what was to be his last solo exhibition at Editalia in Rome The “sign” or stroke is now enlarged, sometimes becoming ironic and allusive In the final period, it was often arranged on tones of ochre, sometimes deployed on a large scale In apparent contrast with the joyfulness that seems to emerge from these later paintings, the decade that followed would be an existentially difficult one, in which artistic activity slowed down and exhibitions were rarer
On 31 January 1980, he died as a result of a car accident
In April, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna dedicated a large retrospective to him In the 1990s, interest in him was revived, often in the context of the renewed attention paid to the ‘Forma’ Group at international level Large anthological exhibitions were held in the museums of Gibellina, Erice, Taormina, Aosta, Salò and Trento (Mart) In 2007, the Sanfilippo Archive was founded, directed by Antonella Sanfilippo In October of the same year the General Catalogue of the Paintings, edited by Giuseppe Appella and Fabrizio D’Amico, was published by De Luca Editori In 2009, a volume also published by De Luca, Sanfilippo Le carte [Sanfilippo Works on Paper] was the first exploration of this aspect of his painting
