Background
Brignoni was born in Chiasso on October 12, 1903, but moved to Bern with his parents in 1907.
In 1923 he went to study in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Serge Brignoni first studied art with Victor Surbek, then continued his studies at the Academy of Arts, Berlin.
Brignoni was born in Chiasso on October 12, 1903, but moved to Bern with his parents in 1907.
Serge Brignoni first studied art with Victor Surbek, then continued his studies at the Academy of Arts, Berlin. In 1923 he went to study in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
During his studying, Serge Brignoni met Alberto Giacometti, Picasso, and other avant-gardists, and where he was first exposed to African art. He began collecting these artworks in 1926 and expanded the scope of his collecting to Melanesian and Indonesian art; he also supported himself in part through sales of these works. During that period, he was also active in his own works, which were Surrealist and Primitivist in character.
Brignoni was a friend of Stanley William Hayter, Wolfgang Paalen and Alberto Giacometti and worked at Atelier 17 in Paris through the 1930s. He joined Gruppe 33 and was represented in the 1935 and 1936 Surrealist exhibits in Copenhagen. In 1940 he was forced to return to Switzerland due to World War II, leaving his own work and his collection behind. Much of the former was lost to theft or destroyed, but the collection was held up by French customs, and was preserved intact, and at the end of the war he was able to retrieve it.
Thanks to his encounters with the artists André Breton and Tristan Tzara in Paris, the young Swiss artist came into contact with Surrealism and immediately espoused its poetic and artistic goals. During his Parisian experience Brignoni became interested in Ethnic Art and started to collect Indonesian and Melanesian sculptures. He resumed his collecting after the war, eventually donating the collection to the city of Lugano in several phases beginning in 1985.
The discovery of ethnic figurative languages had a great impact on Brignoni’s art: he begun to integrate wooden sculpture and the use of eclectic materials into his own artistic practice and became a strong supporter of Primitivism. His personal artistic research was aimed at finding a synthesis between simple volumes and basic contents.
Serge continued to work in a variety of media including sculpture, lithography, collage, and painting; he also taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich. He painted several murals, including one at the Government Headquarters in Bellinzona in 1958 and another in the television headquarters in Comano in 1975. His works were widely exhibited, including a 1997 retrospective show at the Kunstmuseum Bern. He died in that city on January 6, 2002, survived by his second wife Marlyse Haller.
He experimented with lyrical cubism and romantic expressionism before finding his artistic home with the surrealists.
He joined Gruppe 33, an anti-Fascist association of artists based in Basel.
Serge Brignoni married Chilean painter Graziella Aranis in 1935.