Mimmo Germanà

Mimmo Germanà was born in Catania in 1944. He began his self-taught career by being influenced by the post-conceptual climate. He received his first painting prize when, during his military period, he participated in an extemporaneous painting competition. This first acknowledgment confirms him in his vocation even if he hasn't yet found a way to express his art in a personal way. After classical studies followed in Sicily, his homeland, he abandoned it to perfect his artistic knowledge and went to Rome, where he attended the Art Institute and the Academy. In 1968 he met Alessandro Chia and Francesco Clemente, with whom he began his first experiments for a new art form. Clemente, who at the time was a student of Architecture, used photography for his compositions while Chia, who was converting to figurative painting, projected the shadow of a rose onto the white canvas. In the 1970s Mimmo Germanà, an attentive observer and admirer of the German Expressionists (especially Kirchner), of the French Fauves, but also of Munch, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, DeKooning and Chagall, absorbed, elaborated and instinctively created a completely personal. The primitivism of Gauguin's painting blends with the intense colors of his land, Sicily, in compositions which, mixing the dreamlike with the mythological, give rise to a completely personal form of Mediterranean Expressionism. In these youthful years, therefore, which we could define as experimental, he investigated the minimal abstract, the figure and the composition of multiple canvases. Putting all these experiences to good use, in the 1980s a new pictorial journey began which Francesco Gallo described as "a dazzling, rapidly colored fantasy of yellows, reds, blues", a sort of Mediterranean Expressionism, which combined the primitivism of forms with the Dionysian charge of intense colors and strong materials, to compose scenes of mythical scent. This fantastic energy earned him, as early as 1980, participation in the Venice Biennale, invited by the well-known art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, who gathered a small group of young Italian artists under the name of Transavantgarde. Initially part of the Transavantgarde were: Chia, Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino and De Maria and subsequently Mimmo Germanà, Ernesto Tatafiore and Ernesto Longobardi joined the first group. His activity, already very intense in the 70s, years in which he had led him to participate in exhibitions in numerous private Italian galleries, in the 80s also took him abroad, where he was much appreciated. He died ill at the age of 48 in April 1992.