Gianni Bertini was born in Pisa in 1922. He completed scientific studies, graduating in mathematics. Initially a figurative painter, he moved to abstract painting in 1947 and actively participated in the first Italian post-war events.
Between 1948 and 1949 he created a series of paintings I Gridi using stamped letters and numbers (Luna, Luna, Stop, 7, Alt). He first stayed in Rome and in 1950 he moved to Milan. After a brief period of geometric abstraction, he created a series of works where the use of stains was widely applied.
These works were presented in Florence, at the Galleria Numero, in October 1951 together with a poster signed by the author. This event, in chronological order, was the first to propose a lyrical expression in Italy and these works are known as Arte Nucleare. At the end of 1951 he settled in Paris. In 1952 he spent the winter in Spain. In which he held his first solo exhibition in Paris at Galleria Arnaud in 1952.
Between 1954 and 1959 he created a cycle of works where the allusion to the mechanical world is constant. Also in 1954 he was invited to the Salon de Mai in Paris and was subsequently invited regularly every year.
Starting in 1960 he undertook various “bertinizations” and participated in the action of Nouveau Réalisme. Bertini’s iconography, now established and determined, was transferred to everyday reality. The Paese Reale, presented at the Galerie J in Paris in 1962, showed the bertinization of official emblems: flags, stamps, passports, fines, etc.
Later, it was images taken from the news that were inserted into the graphicism. Also in 1960, in collaboration with J.J. Leveque and J.C. Lambert, presents a “poetic strip-tease” in Paris and stays in New York for a long time, also exhibiting in Boston and Chicago. In 1963, from the “appropriation” of emblems and images of daily news, he moves on to photographic reporting, creating his first works on emulsified canvas. In 1965 he signs the first manifesto of MEC-ART.
Towards the mid-seventies, the cycle called Abbaco begins, which, taking inspiration in the first works from a citation of classical painting, hopes for a return to pictorial commitment. These works, which represent the work of a five-year period, are presented in 1978-79 at the Centro Annunciata in Milan. The experience of “Abbaco” continues over time and in several exhibitions these canvases are compared with the Gridi. The Abbaco cycle, like the reverse of a coin, succeeds and opposes the consumerist rituals of the previous cycle and in any case allows images of poignant beauty to emerge, almost as if to whisper hopes: the smile of a child, the tender embrace of a mother, the intimacy of a family interior.
With the maturation of Abbaco Bertini’s work is transformed again; the artist tends more to recover all his stylistic features. In this phase begins the period defined as “Sintesi”, where synthesis is understood, not only as a critical reflection of past experiences, but above all as a dynamic opening towards those spaces of Bertini’s poetics, from the reasoned informal to painting-poetry, in which the insertion of words extrapolated from the language of the media is combined, in the fusion of the photographic report, with the acid and deep tones of the enamels.
The first solo exhibition of this last commitment took place in 1984 at the Fall Gallery in Paris. On this occasion his friend and exegete Pierre Restany noted that “with these works Bertini makes his own self-criticism and at the same time his own self-analysis”.
In the same year a major retrospective was dedicated to him at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques. The following year the French Ministry of Education named him ‘Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres’. In 1988-89 he made several trips to the East, exhibiting at the Museums of Modern Art in Seoul and Taiwan.
On the canvases of the late 1980s, mass media images were replaced by shadows and profiles of anonymous characters, both male and female, dispersed and projected into mechanical situations or backdrops of real events.
As a commentary on the Gulf War, in 1991 he created the cycle Per non dimenticare: it is here that the shadows, silhouetted against the background, of events and machinery, gears and helicopters find their maximum expression. In 1992 he presented a cycle of twelve works on Antonin Artaud. In 1997 he launched the manifesto “La Retro-garde” in opposition to the spread of an art that died in the vagina. The principles of Mec-Art were grafted onto an intense and in-depth chromatic contribution, which hoped for the rebirth of the painter’s profession. In 1999 he presented an exhibition entitled La Retro-garde – La Retroguardia in Paris at the Galerie de L’Europe and in Milan at the Galleria del Naviglio.
In 2000-2002 he was paid numerous tributes with anthological exhibitions Gianni Bertini. Percorsi in Florence (Spaziotempo Art Center) and Pisa (Palazzo Lanfranchi) and two important monographs were published. In 2004 he was present in Milan with three exhibitions: Dal MAC al Mec at Galleria Artrit_2006 and studio and Premesse non promesse Spazio Annunciata and above all the retrospective L’écume du temps at the Mudima Foundation, with a catalogue edited by Dominique Stella.
He participated in the XXIX Venice Biennale in 1958 and with a personal room at the XXXIV edition in 1964; he was also present at the IX, X and XI editions of the Rome Quadriennale (1965, 1972, 1986).
