Background
Turi Simeti was born in Alcamo, in the province of Trapani in 1929.
Turi Simeti was born in Alcamo, in the province of Trapani in 1929.
Turi Simeti moved to Rome in 1958 where he got in touch with the art world getting to know Alberto Burri and to spend time in his studio. These inspirations gave rise, in the early Sixties, to an initial production of works comprising various materials. In these years he also spent long periods of time in London, Paris, and Basel. In the early Sixties, in line with contemporary experiences at the international level motivated by a shared desire to free artistic expression from tradition and pre-established codes through the acquisition of monochromy and relief as the sole compositive forms, his language defined and structured itself around a geometric element, the ellipse, which was to become the code of his artistic work.
In 1963 Simeti participated in the “Review of Figurative Arts of Rome and Lazio”, the Premio Termoli, and the exhibition “Arte Visuale” in the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, thus sharing the dynamics of visual and structural research close to the programmed art and the New Trend. Simeti participated in several exhibitions which were part of this current, such as “New Trend 3” in Zagreb in 1965, and the exhibitions held in the Il Cenobio Gallery in Milano, in Modena and in Reggio Emilia in 1967, as well as other important international art shows dedicated to that area of research, including “Programmed Art – Aktuel 65” and “White on White” in Bern in 1965 and 1966.
His participation in the “Zero Avantgarde” project, which made its debut in 1965 in Lucio Fontana’s studio in Milan, then followed by exhibitions in the galleries Il Punto of Turin and Il Cavallino in Venice, played an even greater role in featuring Simeti’s work as part of this specific scenario. In 1965, once he had moved to Milano, Simeti held his first solo exhibition in the Wulfengasse Gallery in Klagenfurt. The next year he exposed in the Galleria Vismara with a catalogue presentation by Giuseppe Gatt.
Between 1966 and 1969, he was invited as Artist in Residence by the Fairleigh Dickinson University and he spent long periods of time in New York where he set up a studio and produced numerous art works, within the rigorous poetic which he had been gradually defining. Exposed in numerous galleries in Italy (Il Chiodo in Palermo, Giraldi in Livorno, Stefanoni in Lecco), as from the second half of the Sixties, his distinctive work started attracting great attention in Switzerland and in Germany, where his fortune was to grow over the years (in 1971 he held a show in the prestigious M Gallery of Bochum, at Loehr in Frankfurt, in the Bettina gallery in Zurich).
In 1971, in line with the climate of contestation of the period, Simeti staged a performance in the La Bertesca gallery in Genoa with the “Destruction of a sailplane”, storing its rests in blue, signed and numbered cans. However, this event did not entail any radical transformation of his work on surfaces and volumes, although it was to reflect a further sense of rarefaction of the projecting elements, witnessing closer bonds with the poetics of minimalism. In the early Seventies he presented his work in other individual exhibitions in Bergamo, Verona, Rottweil, Dusseldorf, Oldenburg, Köln, München, and participated in a number of group exhibitions, such as “Extension” in the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua, thus confirming his participation to the research carried out in the constructive milieu.
During these years, Simeti’s work was shape-up mainly as consequential research, in the transition from single elements to diptychs and polyptychs with a projecting element, often decentralized, and with an experimentation of different formats and outlines, reaching effects of greater spatial complexity during the Eighties. In the second half of the Seventies his exhibitions brought him to various European cities such as Basel, Dusseldorf, and Koblenz. In 1980 the Municipal Picture Gallery (Pinacoteca) of Macerata hosts an individual exhibition. As from the same year he started working in a new studio in Rio de Janeiro, spending long periods of the winter time in that city and exposing his artwork over the following years, receiving important recognition.
After having installed a sculpture in Gibellina in 1980, he held various exhibitions in Sicily, in the Pagano Gallery of Bagheria, in the Opera Universitaria of Palermo sario Bruno in Sciacca. In 1982 he presented a solo exhibition at the Studio Grossetti in Milan. Subsequently his work has been presented in numerous private galleries abroad, such as the Passmann Gallery in Fribourg and the Wack Gallery of Kaiserslautern in 1983, the Maier Gallery in Kitzbüehl and the Ahrens Gallery in Coblenz in 1984, the Paulo Figueiredo Gallery in San Paolo of Brazil and the 44 Gallery in Dusseldorf in 1985, the Apicella Gallery in Bonn in 1986 and the Monochrome Gallery in Aachen in 1987.
After years of intense work at the International level, Simeti came back to Italy in 1989 with a solo show presented at the Vismara Gallery in Milan. His works were exposed with those by Castellani, Bonalumi and others in exhibitions such as “The extroflexed Canvas in the Milanese Area from 1958 until Today” at the Arte Struktura Gallery in 1989 and “‘58-‘80 Bonalumi – Castellani – Simeti: Three Itineraries”, presented the year after in another Milanese venue, the Millennium Gallery, thereby stressing that the extroflexion by Simeti featured contiguous but also antithetical values with respect to the analogous compositive and constructive techniques of Castellani and Bonalumi.
In 1991 he presented a wide selection of works at the Civic Museum of Gibellina, with a catalogue presentation by Elena Pontiggia. During the Nineties, in addition to individual exhibitions of recent works in Rio de Janeiro, Biberach, Kaiserslautern, Milan (Vinciana gallery), Bolzano, and Trapani, other retrospectives were presented in 1996 in the Kunstverein of Ludwigsburg and in Erice, the latter with a catalogue preface by Marco Meneguzzo. At this point his work featured a multiplication and dispersion of the volumetric and projecting oval elements on the surface, with a more intense and diversified coloration, recovering values of architectural relation to an increasingly evident extent.
In 1998 he held an individual exhibition at the Kain Gallery of Basle, followed the year after by other exhibitions in Biberach (once again in the Uli Lang gallery), Ladenburg and Mannheim and by a participation in the exhibition “Art in Italy in the Seventies” at the Salerniana in Erice. Other recent individual exhibitions of the artist have been presented at the Harry Zellweger Art Studio in Basel and in the Uwe Sacksofsky Gallery in Heidelberg, both in 2000. In 2001 Simeti’s work was exposed at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art Gallarate. Between 2002 and 2003 he held numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad, amongst which shows at the Fondazione Mudima, Milan, the Gallery Rino Costa in Casale Monferrato, the Galleria Bergamo, in the city of Bergamo, the Maier Gallery in Kitzbühel, the Gallery Wack, in Kaiserslautern, Immoblilia in Verona, the Giraldi Gallery, in Livorno, Arte Silva, in Seregno, and Carte d’arte Mostre, in Catania.
In 2004 Simeti’s held a show at the Galleria Poleschi in Milan, presented by Luca Beatrice. The following year, in 2005 a solo exhibition was organized in Lugano at ARTantide.com. Again in Lugano, the BIM – Banca Intermobiliare proposed an exhibition of Simeti’s work in 2006. In 2006 Excalibur Gallery in Solcio di Lesa organized a personal exhibition with a catalogue by Flaminio Gualdoni. In novembre 2007 la Fiera D’Arte di Padova invited him for an anthological exhibition as a side event to the Fiera. Amongst the various exhibitions held in the most recent years, it’s worth pointing out his personal shows held at the GlobArt Gallery in Acqui Terme in 2007, accompanied by a voluminous catalogue, his 2008 show presented by Paolo Campiglio at the Poleschi Gallery in Milan, as well as his shows held in Genoa at the “Spazio Satura” Palace and at the Armanda Gori Casa D’Arte in Prato, then taken to the Fiera D’Arte in Cremona and at the Maretti Arte Monaco of Montecarlo where in 2009 he exposed a selection of his most recent work.
In October 2009 an installation of large white paintings in studio d’arte contemporanea Pino Casagrande in Roma and in February 2001 a two months exposition of large painting in the galleria Salvatore + Caroline Ala in Milano, in august a large one man show retrospective to his hometown of Alcamo. He currently lives and works in Milano.
Forme ovali al negativo
1966Ovali blu in negativo
1966Superficie verde con ovali
1966Superficie bianca con ovale in positivo
1967Untitled
1967Blu
1968Ovali
1970Segno grigio
1971Particolare di ovale in nero
1973Un quadrato bianco
1973Un ovale nero
1973Cinque ovali neri
2007Quattro ovali bianchi
2009Turi Simeti adhered to the artistic traditions of Spatialism. Minimalist in conception, for the last 50 years, Simeti’s work has comprised of dynamic patterns of ovals that dance across the monochromatic surfaces of shaped canvases. This focused combination of color and shape speaks to Simeti’s concern with emphasizing the physical presence of the artwork itself, rather than an expression of the artist’s voice. Simeti has broken through key tenants of minimalism to explore the play of light on shapes created on monochromatic and tactile canvas surfaces.
Simeti moved to Milan in 1965, and joined Italy’s ZERO movement, which was originally founded in 1958 by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene.