Enrico Prampolini
Student of Duilio Cambellotti at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, he was a leading exponent of Futurism and had close contacts with the representatives of the European artistic avant-gardes, with Dadaism with the Section d'Or, the Bauhaus, the De Stijl, the Abstraction et Création group, with Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Vasilij Kandinskij and Jean Cocteau, operating theoretically and practically also in the architecture sector.
From 1913 for
one period collaborates with the Milanese monthly magazine Varietas. In 1917 he founded the magazine Noi with Bino Sanminiatelli, and in the same year he designed the sets for the futurist-inspired film Thaïs by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, for which he created the interiors of a dreamlike and suffocating villa, whose walls are decorated with spirals, lozenges, chessboards and symbolic figures and that will have so much influence in the anti-naturalistic scenographies of German Expressionism.
Prampolini occupies a place unto itself in the European panorama of abstract art, characterized by his profound interest in dynamism and organicism, which manifested itself in the thirties and forties in cosmic and dreamlike visions. In 1927 he founded the Prampolini Futurist Theater. In 1928 he conceived the Futurist Pavilion at the Valentino Exhibition in Turin, executed by Fillia and Pino Curtone. With Fillia he created in 1933 a large mosaic Communications for the tower of the Palazzo delle Poste in La Spezia. In 1934 he organized, with Fillia and Defilippis, in Genoa, the First Exhibition of Mural Plastic for Fascist Building, strongly desired by Marinetti, finally winning it, with the work Synthesis cosmic of fascist Italy, in front of Alf Gaudenzi and Giovanni Braggion.
After the futurist experience, he also creates multi-material works and, always in search of the becoming of matter, paints bioplastic works, in which he appears at times influenced by visions of the microcosm. His intent was, as he himself said, to express the extreme latitudes of the introspective world.
Died in 1956, he is buried in the Verano Cemetery.
