Edgardo Corbelli Contemporary

Change and vitality are concepts that well “define” the work of Edgardo Corbelli (Turin 1918 – 1989), a painter whose complex artistic path reveals the constant search for his own identity.

From the 1930s onwards, Corbelli’s very personal art has intertwined countless suggestions, affinities and cultural references which helped to focus on his own aptitudes and expressive choices.

The overall vision gradually acquires an expressionist flavor (we recall the courses by Oskar Kokoschka attended by Corbelli at the Salzburg Academy in 1958), his figures and landscapes become a revisited reality, the expression of an interior life full of contrasts, joys and dramas, such as the indelible experience of the concentration camps during the Second World War.

Corbelli’s artistic evolution is perennial, because it coincides with his existential journey. His vital energy is preferably transferred to the female figure, which, over the years, becomes the dominant subject of his art, as well as in the drafting of the brushstrokes and in the use of colour. In Corbelli, as the art critic Angelo Mistrangelo summarizes, «every emotion is instantly transformed into a pictorial emotion […] in a symphony of high-level musicality.»