Lamberto Pignotti (born 26 April 1926 in
Florence
Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025.
Florence ...
) is an Italian poet, writer and visual artist.
Biography
In the early 1960s, he was one of the first artists who worked on intersections between poetry, word and
mass media
Mass media include the diverse arrays of media that reach a large audience via mass communication.
Broadcast media transmit information electronically via media such as films, radio, recorded music, or television. Digital media comprises b ...
, influenced by the
avant-garde
In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...
and
Pop Art. Pignotti and
Eugenio Miccini are considered to be the initiators of Italian
visual poetry
Visual poetry is a style of poetry that incorporates graphic and visual design elements to convey its meaning. This style combines visual art and written expression to create new ways of presenting and interpreting poetry.
Visual poetry focuses on ...
. Pignotti was a professor in the Faculty of Architecture of the
University of Florence
The University of Florence ( Italian: ''Università degli Studi di Firenze'') (in acronym UNIFI) is an Italian public research university located in Florence, Italy. It comprises 12 schools and has around 50,000 students enrolled.
History
The f ...
and in DAMS of Bologna, where he taught courses on the avant-garde,
mass-media and
new media.
He creates performances and poetry events involving
synesthesia
Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People with sy ...
and the senses: poems to eat, to drink, to hear, to sniff, to put in action with gestures and voice. He creates
visual poems;
these are collage elaborations with writing on images and photography taken from mass media, with the aim of to making evident its contradictions in a playful process similar to those of Pop Art. He has created
object-books with various materials, performance using text fragments variously combined, sometimes involving the public.
He was part of Gruppo '63, the
Neoavanguardia
The Neoavanguardia ("New Vanguard") was a postmodern avant-garde literature of Italy, Italian literary movement oriented towards radical forms of experimentation with language and art. Some of its most prominent members include Nanni Balestrini, E ...
art movement in Italy.
His work has been exhibited in many countries and has been written about by critics such as
Bruno Mondadori (''Storia dell'arte Italiana di Electa''). Other art critics who have been interested in Pignotti's work are
Gillo Dorfles,
Giulio Carlo Argan,
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian Medieval studies, medievalist, philosopher, Semiotics, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular ...
and
Achille Bonito Oliva
Achille Bonito Oliva (born 1939) is an Italian art critic and historian of contemporary art. Since 1968 he has taught history of contemporary art at La Sapienza, the university of Rome. He has written extensively on contemporary art and contemp ...
.
In the 1990s, he began to get involved in the art network online, participating with visual poems and performances in internet events.
Exhibitions
Biennale di Venezia,
Quadriennale di Roma
The Rome Quadriennale (Italian: La Q''uadriennale di Roma'', also called in English the ''Rome Quadrennial'') is the Italian national institution entrusted with the task of researching about and promoting Italian contemporary art. It is a found ...
, the avant-garde festival of New York, São Paulo Biennial.
Bibliography
* ''Sine æsthetica, sinestetica. Poesia visiva e arte plurisensoriale'', Roma, Empiria, 1990
* ''Nozione di uomo'', Milano, Mondadori, 1964
* ''Una forma di lotta'', Milano, Mondadori, 1967
* ''Parola per parola'', diversamente, Venezia, Marsilio, 1976
* ''Vedute'', Roma, Edizioni Florida, 1982
* ''Questa storia o un’altra'', Napoli, Guida, 1984
* ''In principio'', with presentation essays by Marcello Carlino, Francesco Muzzioli, Giorgio Patrizi, Cosenza, UH scrittura & poesia, 1986
* ''Zone marginali'', Pasian di Prato (UD), Campanotto, 1991
* ''Odissea'', Roma, Fermenti, 1994.
* ''Le nudità provocanti'', Bologna, Sampietro, 1965
* ''Giro del mondo'', Napoli, Medusa, 1987
* ''Tutte le direzioni'', Roma, Empiria, 1988
* AAVV, ''Lamberto Pignotti'', Firenze, Edizioni META, 1999
* ''Scritture convergenti. Letteratura e mass media'', Pasian di Prato-UD, Campanotto Editore, 2005
References
External links
Interview(in Italian)
MART Rovereto
See also
*Visual Poetry
Visual poetry is a style of poetry that incorporates graphic and visual design elements to convey its meaning. This style combines visual art and written expression to create new ways of presenting and interpreting poetry.
Visual poetry focuses on ...
* Digital Poetry
*Concrete Poetry
Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...
*Fluxus
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental performance art, art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finishe ...
*Futurism
Futurism ( ) was an Art movement, artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the ...
* Gruppo 63
External links
* Lamberto Pignotti Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pignotti, Lamberto
1926 births
Living people
Italian poets
Italian male poets
Visual poets
Italian multimedia artists
Italian contemporary artists
Artists from Florence
Gruppo 63
Academic staff of the University of Florence