Licata Riccardo

«through his complex and original “writing”, a truly personal yet at the same time universal language, he has looked for a new means to depict reality»

Riccardo Licata was born in Turin on  December 20, 1929. After a brief stay in Paris, he moved with his family first to Rome, where he lived from 1935 to 1945, and then to Venice. In 1947 he attended the Liceo Artistico, where he studied under Luciano Gasperi and Mario De Luigi. He became interested to the artistic culture of the Bauhaus, and tank to the painter Romualdo Scarpa he started working on mosaic, which was to prove decisive for his future.

In 1948 he repeatedly visited the International Biennale in Venice and met the artists of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, who led the debate on the renewal of Italian art in the post-war period. Among them were Giusepe Santomaso, Renato Birolli, Armando Pizzinato, Emilio Vedova, Renato Guttuso, Giulio Turcato e Lorenzo Viani.

In 1949, together with Ennio Finzi, Tancredi Parmeggiani, Bruno Blenner e lo scultore Giorgio Zennaro, he formed a group of young artists with a tendency towards abstractionism. He regularly went to concerts at the Teatro La Fenice and at the Festival di Musica Contemporanea at the Venice Biennale. In this period began to take shape his artistic language, his “graphic-pictorial writing”, composed of symbols and graphic lines inspired by music.

In 1950 he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice where he attended painting courses held by Bruno Saetti; in 1951 he set his first solo exhibition, getting the attention of the most important art critics in Venice at the time.

He partecipated in the Venice Biennale of 1952, 1954 and 1956. In 1953 he was at the Triennale in Milan; in 1955 he was invited to the Biennale in Sao Paulo, Brazil; in 1956 he exhibited at the Quadriennale in Rome. He won many prestigious awards for his painting and, in 1957 he was awarded a scholarship and moved to Paris as an assistant of Gino Severini in the professorship of mosaics.

He started frequenting the studios of Stanley Hayter, Johnny Friedlaender and Henri Goetz, as well as artists and critics such as Sebastian Matta, Victor Brauner, Friedensreich Huntertwasser, Robert Lebel, Alain Jouffroy and the Italians Tancredi Parmeggiani e Aldo Mondino. He regularly coming back to Venice, where he has always maintained a home-studio. In 1961, he married Maria Battistella, singer and scholar of old folk and Renaissance ballads, and they had a son, Giovanni, in 1962. Music will fill his heart and life.

From 1970 he has taught experimental engraving techniques at the International Graphics School in Venice. In 1963 he won the Premio Michetti, and in 1975 the First Prize in the Rassegna della Grafica in Forlì. Riccardo Licata later took part in the Venice Biennales of 1964, 1970 and 1972, in the Quadriennale in Rome, in the biennales of Paris, Sao Paulo, Alexandria, and in the most important international graphics biennales.

Solo exhibitions of his works have been put on in the most important cities in Italy, Europe and all over the world. He has made large public mosaics, mostly in Italy and France. His works are to be found in the museums of modern art of Milan, Florence, Alessandria, Rome, Turin, Mulhouse, Warsaw, Sao Paulo, Vienna, New York, Chicago, Stockholm, Stuttgart, and of course Venice.

He passed away in Venice in 2014.