Post-war Italian artist Fabio Mauri’s practice encompasses performance, film, installation, found-object sculpture, mixed media works and theoretical writings to question readings of history and the associated power of language and ideology associated with the Second World War and the Holocaust. Sobering, direct, and poetically reflective, Mauri’s art addresses themes of communication and manipulation, and brings light to the ‘political dimension of the image,’ as it is projected and proliferated throughout contemporary society.Born in Rome in 1926, Mauri’s youth was marked by the events of war and Fascism—traumas and horrors that would profoundly impact and influence his life and work. Raised among writers and painters, Mauri befriended intellectuals in Italy’s new avant-garde, among them the novelist Italo Calvino, philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco, film director and aficionado Pier Paolo Pasolini, visual artist Jannis Kounellis, art historian Maurizio Calvesi and the writer Edoardo Sanguineti. ‘I patiently recompose,’ the artist commented, ‘with my own hands, the experience of the shameful. I explore its mental possibilities… I behave as if that reality (that history) had not had its final condemnation, but were still adding further data right up to our time today.’
The screen as a symbol emerges as early as 1957 and remains essential to the articulation of his work. Whether cinema, television or computer it allows for an exploration of meaning, images and codes. Through this Mauri proposes to his audience an examination, a critique and an experience of the ‘real.’
Mauri worked for the family company, the publishing house Bompiani, from 1957 to 1975 as director of the Milan and Rome headquarters. Along with Umberto Eco and Edoardo Sanguineti, he founded the magazine Quindici (1967) and the magazine for arts criticism, La citta di Riga in 1976. Such as his oeuvre, Mauri is undefinable practicing as artist, playwright, publisher, critic and teacher throughout his career. He never belonged to any specific artistic movement but kept a close proximity to various artists and discourses. Mauri has exhibited his work internationally in prominent institutions.
