Antonio Tamburro
(1948, Isernia, Italy)

Antonio Tamburro is born in 1948 in Isernia. After attending art school, he enrols at the Accademy of Fine Arts of Naples in 1966 where he has Professor Giovanni Brancaccio as a lecturer. In 1968, after his studies in Naples, he attends a paintings course at the Accademy of Fine Arts in Rome, under the direction of Professor Franco Gentilini.
In Rome Tamburro begins to exhibit works in some of Rome's prestigious galleries, drawing praise from both critics and the public. In the same year he creates the scenery for several operas that are held at the Flavio Vespasiano Teatre of Rieti. In 1969 Tamburro returns to Isernia for awhile, where he paints a fresco cycle for the Church of San Felice.
Between 1970 and 1973 the painter frequents Italian cultural spheres, in particular Naples, Rome (where he meets Orfeo Tamburi, Domenico Purificato, Giorgio De Chirico, and Fausto Pirandello) and Perugia, where he establishes himself by tightening his friendships with the art representatives of Umbria city.
In 1978 he is asked to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts of Spoleto.
In 1981 he leaves teaching permanently to dedicate himself exclusively to painting. Numerous art reviews begin to take an interest in him and many editorials are dedicated to his works.
In 1983 one of his important one-man shows is displayed in the prestigious Palazzo Comunale di Perugia.
In 1984 he is the protagonist of a monumental work of art in the "Salone dell'Armatura" of the 3F Italian school. At the same time he is putting together a collective show with Burri, De Gregorio and Rambaldi.
In 1985 he is commissioned to do a large fresco in the Church of Santa Maria Assunta in Perugia and a mural in the city of Dozza, a small town in the province of Bologna in which the facades of the houses have been frescoed by all the major contemporary artists. In the same year he meets the painter Remo Brindisi and Gastone Breddo with whom he will maintain lasting friendships. He also begins his collaboration with the Ghelfi Gallery of Verona and Montecatini Terme with two large exhibitions. The first is held in the Terme Torretta of Montecatini Terme and the second in the "Palazzo della Gran Guardia" of Verona.
In 1986 a one-man show is exhibited in the hall of the Municipal Casino of Sanremo.
In 1987 an exhibition of his works is held at the Margherita Gallery, with the patronage of the Comune of Taranto and the Provincial Administration.
In 1988, by invitation of the Committee Organizer, he attends the Tour of Italy to produce a cycle of paintings of the theme of bicycle racing, which is then displayed in the various Italian cities along the route. At the end of the tour Ghelfi Publisher-Verona publishes a catalogue entitled "The Bycicles of A. Tamburro" with an introduction by the famous sports columnist Adriano De Zan and text by Jean Pierre Jouvet.
In 1989 he completes a large mural in the city of Como. The following year, the editor Giorgio Mondadori publishes a catalogue in the collection "Presenze", with an in-depth essay written by Dario Micacchi.
Two years later a one-man show entitled "The Juliet’s of Tamburro", consisting of thirty-seven paintings, is exhibited in the evocative setting of Juliet's house in Verona. The same year Tamburro exhibits a series of paintings on beaches in the Rodel Gallery of Darmstadt. In Hamburg The Hallbach Gallery displays a collection of twenty Parisian landscapes, the fruit of his trip several months prior. This exhibition is discussed in an important essay edited by Hoffman Verlag Editions-Frankfurt.
A wide number of exhibitions in prestigious Italian art galleries follow one after the other in the years between 1990 and 1996, the year in which a survey of his paintings is held in the Teodora Art Gallery of Toronto, Canada.
In 1997 and in 1998 the painter goes to Paris for several months where he spends his time in an artistic circle and has the opportunity to throughly study the European art Collections of the important museums. In the same year, together with Ennio Calabria, Concetto Pozzati, Mimmo Rotella, Ugo Nespolo and Sandro Ghia, he participates in the selection committee of a competition entitled "The model in art".
In January 2000 a series of his works are exhibited at the exhibition "Art Miami 2000", winning noteworthy praise from the public and from critics.
From 2001 up to the present Tamburro exhibited in numerous italian and international galleries wich include individual shows in “Padua Art Gallery”, Padova 2003 – Gallery “Michelangelo” – Roma 2004, – Personale “Galleria Ruez”, Monaco, 2004 –, “Sala Segantini” – Savognin,Switzerland 2005 – “Galleria Ruez” – Asburgo, Germany 2006.
He permanently exhibits his work in Galeria Villa Del Arte Barcelona Spain.
A colourful glimpse of the suburbs, an old-fashioned motorbike, a lonely and silent coffee bar, or even an attractive nude woman: sooner or later in the paintings of Antonio Tamburro, everything plunges into the depths of memory and then rises again to the surface, transfigured.
From the beginning to present, his artistic development has taken the form of a style of painting that is seemingly figurative and which also conveys strong emotions; it is a strict as well as meticulous search, disciplined in its rigorous execution and in the slow materialisation of the image into the canvas.
At times, though elsewhere almost on the verge of a hyper-realistic expression, some of his works seem to eagerly deny a merely imitative practice of art and the viewer is faced with a subtle game of existential allusions.
This is indeed an integral part of the artist's desire to slightly blur the edges of reality and submerge its meanings, to seduce and, at the same time, disorientate the viewer.
Antonio Tamburro is a painter who is concerned with both the fascination of daily episodes and the abstraction of the moment.
He exposes himself to visual inspiration, followed by a lengthy process of tackling the theme in search of the most intense and the most distinctive presentational form, never losing sight of life's essential values.
Tamburro's works also demonstrate the artist's preoccupation with the manipulation of time, obtained through a splintered dialogue represented by a passing state of mind.
It is indeed according to a variety of moods that Antonio Tamburro subjects have been selected: a handful of essential, everyday motifs, large related to the city and the environment, portraying the visual significance incidental choreographs, which remind one of Mario Mafai or Pasolini's "borgate" in Rome.
An essential role is played by light; vibrating and dazzling, it provides opportunities for unexpected chromatic visions which eventually reveal the spell of familiar outlines.
This light causes entire blocks of flats, possibly the view from his studio window in the city, to take on a transparent, almost dematerialised quality. Here, once again, Tamburro makes use of pictorial means to reflect and comment upon the world surrounding us, upon the passing of things and of time.
The features that distinguish the artist's urban compositions are Constant: continual reflections of lights and colour emerging from a monochrome background, absolute fragmentation of surfaces and, above all, an intensity of vision combined with an accuracy of style.
On the other hand, when he confronts three human figure, it is the spontaneous pose, the unexpected composition of form and existential arguments of the common man, which constantly permeate the painter's artistic endeavours.
Both in the case of sensuous nude females and of his working class vacationers moving about under a desolate sun, human surfaces are not treated as anatomically naturalistic reproductions but rather as vulnerable membranes separating the figure's inner life from the daily realities of its surroundings. It is as if these works represent a place in our memory, lodged in the back of our minds, strongly subjective as well as inherent to each individual and the imagination of the artist, but nonetheless a collective experience.
Tamburro's pictorial vivacity and compelling power are adapted better to fairly large formats. He feels at case dominating the canvas with bold gestures, confidently approaching and exploiting the canvas with a highly pictorial and lyrical chromatic structure. Colour, along with light, becomes the principle operating force that continually "excite" Tamburro’s pictorial vision while investing his art with an eruptive quality that is derived from an acute awareness of life and things.
A certain minimalism undoubtedly hangs over some of Antonio Tamburro's works and here is where their undeniable artistic quality probably lies. But these paintings are comprehensible at first glance without being banal, paintings which always tell a story without relinquishing it, paintings in which the observer in the end finds reflections of his own experiences and quiet ills which will surely follow him into the future.