Paolo Baratella ( 1935 - 2023 )

Paolo Baratella (1935 -2023) was born in Bologna but grew up in Ferrara and then moved to Milan. He began to exhibit his work at the very end of the 1950s, first in Italy then in Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium and Russia. First interested in informal painting, he discovered Pop art in the early 1960s and began to paint very committed political and social paintings, which brought him closer to other Milanese artists such as Giangiacomo Spadari and Fernando De Filippi, alongside whom he exhibited at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris in 1973 and 1974. In his work, Baratella uses both painting, photographic transfer and collage . In 1968, there are artists who participate in the Red Room for Vietnam, called "Demonstration of support for the Vietnamese people", within the Salon of young painting. Having often exhibited in France, Baratella's work is linked to French Narrative Figuration but in a more pop vein. He was also selected by the French critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot for the exhibition Mythologies Quotidiennes 2, organized in 1977 at the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, which aims to be an anthology of this French-style pop that is Narrative Figuration. Baratella participated in the Venice Biennale in 1972, 1989 and 2011. Several museum exhibitions have been dedicated to him over time, in Italy and abroad. Oil on canvas not signed to clean cracks everywhere (to be restored) (see photos). it is annotated on the back on the Paolo Baratella frame in 1963, its address in Milan and a label from the Galerie Mouffe Paris V which sold it at the time, which justifies that it is indeed an original work by the artist. Size: 50 x 60 cm with original strip: 51 x 61 cm