Biography
Born in Alba in 1902, he came to painting in the early fifties, after meeting Piero Simondo, transferring the interests and the different skills gained during his previous experiences. The decisive impulse comes thanks to a second meeting that took place in the summer of 1955 in Albissola, the one with the Danish artist Asger Jorn. In September of the same year, Gallizio, Jorn and Simondo founded the Experimental Laboratory of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (M.I.B.I.) in Alba, the common seat of artistic experimentation, debate and driving force of cultural and political battles. With the organization in 1956 of the 1st World Congress of Free Artists, Alba will become a meeting place for artists and intellectuals from all over Europe. In 1957 Gallizio participated in the founding of the Situationist International with Guy Debord, Michèle Bernstein, Asger Jorn, Walter Olmo, Piero Simondo, Elena Verrone, Rulph Rumney. By now full-time artist Gallizio in February 1958 began the production of “industrial painting”, using canvases up to 74 meters long, intended to be cut and sold by the meter. In 1959 at the Galerie Drouin in Paris the long rolls of industrial painting became one of the first environmental paintings: the Antimatter Cavern (1958-1959). The recognition of the value of his research is testified by numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad, from Paris to Munich to Copenhagen, and in particular by the important staff at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and by the personal room at the Venice Biennale of 1964, inaugurated a few months after the sudden death of the artist.