Bobo Piccoli

Bobo Piccoli was born in 1927 into a family of Milanese intellectuals. The Piccoli house was frequented by Mario Sironi, Carlo Carrà, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Salvatore Quasimodo and many other artists. Piccoli studied the classics, he learned and assimilated Greek art, as well as sculpture and architecture, iconography and mosaics. He loved Giotto and the Renaissance, Caravaggio and Savinio, he was always interested in light in art and in architecture, in cinema and theatre. He loved to read Bertold Brecht, Samuel Beckett and Jean Paul Sartre, surrealists such as Antonin Artaud and André Breton, and Fiabe Italiane by Italo Calvino. While painting was his main medium, Bobo Piccoli constantly sought a syntesis among the arts, leading to many of his projects with architects including Roberto Menghi, Alberto Scarzella, Marco Zanuso, Leonardo Fiori, Ezio Sgrelli.His contributions to iconic works of architecture such as Petrolchimico di Brindisi (1959), Ian Battistoni, il Palazzo delle Stelline in Corso Magenta a Milano (1972), il Centro Civico di Pieve Emanuele, (1980), la piazza del Comune di Cislago (1981), are exemplary. In 1968 he began working for FontanaArte in a contemplation of the relationship between art and serial products. Piccoli created a number of lighting elements for FontanaArte, including the Re and Regina lamps (1968), Modulo (1969), Clessidra (1970) and the mirror Reame (1968).