Ettore Spalletti
Ettore Spalletti is the only artist to have obtained the homage of a retrospective in three of the main Italian institutions at the same time (in 2014 at the GAM of Turin, the MAXXI of Rome and the MADRE of Naples). His work is very well-known also abroad, above all in Europe. His exhibitions include several participations in the Venice Biennale (1982, 1993, 1995, 1997) and documenta of Kassel (1982, 1992). A singular situation for an artist who never moved from Capelle sul Tavo, a village in the province of Pescara, where he was born in 1936. From the mid-‘70s he made his works, sculptures or paintings, always with the same technique: various layers of a mixture of pigment and plaster followed by smoothing of the surface to obtain a smooth, sensitive surface from which an inner light almost seems to emerge. In this way he created a kind of fragile, poetic minimalism. The lines are sometimes slightly curved and the colors delicate. With the white, grey and gold, pastel shades prevail: pinks, and above all blues, whose composition recalls the colors of the backgrounds of the medieval altar-pieces and frescoes.
Spalletti’s aspiration was to touch on infinity, the eternal, the crossover point between the real world and the spiritual world. It is in fact no coincidence that he was asked to create some environments of a spiritual nature, such as the Chapel of Villa Serena in Pescara and the morgue of the hospital of Garches in France.
Regarding the economic situation, his values are stable, tending to increase. After his death in October 2019 they peaked considerably, also due to the interest of important international galleries.
