Mario Deluigi (De Luigi)

born Treviso 1901 - died Venice 1978

Mario Deluigi trained at Venice's "Accademia di Belle Arti" under Ettore Tito and Virgilio Guidi.
He first exhibited his work in 1928 at the
XIX Collettiva dell'Opera Bevilacqua La Masa and,
in 1930, contributed to the Venice Biennale
for the first time.

Around 1934 he became interested in Cubism and in Synthetic Cubism above all.

From 1942 to 1944 he was assistant to Arturo Martini
at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venice and in the latter year held his first one - man show at the
Galleria del Cavallino. In 1946 he won the
Premio Burano, founded the Scuola Libera di Arti Plastiche (with Carlo Scarpa and Anton Giulio Ambrosini) and began teaching set design at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venice (IUAV)
where he remained until 1971.

In 1947 he was the winner of the Premio Abano.
In the early 1950's the artist turned towards abstract work, signing up in 1951 to the Manifesto dell'Arte Spaziale and engaging thereafter in the Movimento Spaziale per la Televisione in 1952.

Deluigi continued his deliberation on connections between space, light and colour that would become a dominant theme in his work - where light is conceived as a structural device not simply painted but created within the canvas by means of strokes cut into the surface. This technique of 'grattage', which already appeared well - defined at the Biennale of Venice of 1954 in work entitled Motivi sui Vuoti (Motifs on Voids), characterises the whole of his subsequent output.

During the 1960's and 1970's Deluigi kept up his investigations into light and took part in national
and international exhibitions including the Biennale of Venice of 1930, 1932, 1948, 1950, 1952, 1954,
1962 in a sala personale (personal exhibition room),
in 1968 (sala personale) and at the Quadriennale di Roma in 1959 and 1972.

In 1980 the Biennale of Venice organised a retrospective exhibition of his work in the
church of S.Stae.

In 1991, an important anthological collection was shown at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Ca' Pesaro in Venice, and again in 1997 at Palazzo Ragazzoni - Flangini Biglia, Sacile.