The Surrealism Website
Fabrizio Clerici (1913-1993)
Fabrizio Clerici was born in Milan. In 1920 Clerici moved with his family to Rome, where he studied at the Scuola Superiore di Architettura, and obtained an architecture degree in 1937. The Roman monuments, architecture and paintings from the Italian Renaissance and the baroque period considerably influenced him, as did certain religious works. In Rome he attended conferences by Le Corbusier, and in 1936 he became a friend of the metaphysical painter, Alberto Savinio. They admired each other's work. A few years later in 1938 he met Giorgio de Chirico in Milan.
At the end of the 1930s he made his first dreamlike and fantastic paintings, based on his memory of events, locations and persons transformed by the filter of time. Through his reconstruction of images, Clerici evolved naturally towards surrealism, but remained influenced by the metaphysical art of Savinio and de Chirico.
Clerici settled in Rome in 1949, where he undertook set designs fot theatrical productions and took part in shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.
During the 1980s and 1990s Clerici was the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna, the Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara (1983), the Palazzo Reale, Caserta (1987), and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome.
