Artist
Cavellini's artistic career found its beginnings from a talent for brush and ink script, used on windows and price cards at the family business. He later found himself scripting Mussolini's slogans during his army service. Dabblings with painting and drawing through the mid-1940s were eventually replaced in the early 1960s by works best classified as Neo-Dada or Nouveau Realiste. He would continue this diversion from traditional forms into the 1970s and 1980s with Mail art and Conceptual art.
"As these artistic activities unfolded Cavellini formed two essential convictions. First, art-making is fundamentally a form of behavior. In this he embraced a 20th-century tradition stretching from Dada through Fluxus and Austrian Actionism. Second, and more distinctively Cavellinian, art history and all that accompanies it--biography, taste, market values, reputations--are malleable fictions and therefore suitable materials for the artist" (Vetrocq 1993).
His eventual reputation as a mail artist resulted in part from the sheer number of individuals with whom he corresponded. In 1978, he sent his work Nemo propheta in patria, by post, to over 15,000 recipients.
Read more about this topic: Guglielmo Achille Cavellini
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