Lamberto Pignotti - Biography

Biography

In the early 1960s he was one of the first artists who worked creating intersections between poetry, word and mass media, fixing theoretical basis and assembling traditions of avant-garde and Pop Art. Lamberto Pignotti, together with Eugenio Miccini, is considered to be one of the initiators of Italian visual poetry. He collaborated with national and international journals, with television programs of RAI. He was professor in the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florence and in DAMS of Bologna, where he hold courses on avant-garde, mass-media, and new media. Theoretician and artist using synesthesia in the arts, he creates performances and poetry events where are present linguistic, verbal, and gesture signs, involving the five senses. We have performance actions with poems to eat, to drink, to hear, to sniff, to put in action with gestures and voice. His visual poems are realized as collage elaborations with writing on images and photography taken from the world of mass media, with the aim to make evident its contradictions in a ludic process similar to the one of Pop Art. Lamberto Pignotti has realized object-books with various materials, performance using text fragments variously combined, also involving the public. His work has been presented in many countries and is included also in didactical books in Italy, such as Storia dell'arte Italiana di Electa-Bruno Mondadori. The most relevant Italian art critics were interested in Lamberto Pignotti's work, among them: Gillo Dorfles, Giulio Carlo Argan, Umberto Eco, Achille Bonito Oliva. In the 1990s he began to get involved in the art network on line, participating with his visual poems and performances in several events in the Internet in the context of new media art meetings and art databases.