Giancarlo Sangregorio was born in Milan in 1925. At a very young age, he started chiselling in the quarries of Val d’Ossola (Lago Maggiore) as an amateur. After finishing high school for classical studies, he continued his studies at the Brera Academy in Milan where he attended classes of the Italian sculptor Marino Marini. In 1952, he prepared his first solo exhibition in Milan. This was also the time of his study travels abroad, with frequent stops in Paris. He later acquired an atelier of his own in the French capital. Between 1950 and 1958, he spent a lot of time in Versilia, where he was engaged in pottery and the carving of Apuan marble. In addition to his solo exhibitions, he also participated at important group exhibitions at home and abroad (France, USA, Mexico, Argentina, Yugoslavia, Japan, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, etc.). His works are kept in public and private collections in Italy and around the world. The sculptor lived and worked in Sesto Calende (Varese, Italy), where he died in 2013.
The Italian art profession ranks this Lombard sculptor among important representatives of post-war sculpting in Italy, even though he never managed to achieve the breakthrough achieved by his colleagues, such as Lucio Fontana, Enrico Baj, or Mimmo Rotella. In his sculpting creations Sangregorio, a curious intellectual traveller attracted to primitive cultures, explored the play between the full and empty, the intertwining of different materials, and the rejection of firm composition rules, in which we can sense the influence of Art Informel. In his works, we can feel the admiration of nature, its changing rhythms, and the preservation of characteristic peculiarities of the chosen materials, either stone, wood or glass. All of this can also be discerned from the Portorose symposium sculpture. It is built from different pieces, as a kind of a conglomerate, in which we can occasionally observe processes of the stonemason’s work (an uneven sequence of holes, grooves, etc.). The preserved structures of the primary material are the living language of nature, which needed a limited amount of careful intervention by the sculptor’s hand in the raw stone in order to create a statue with an original artistic message: to preserve its own form in stone, without excessive carving, drilling, or smoothing. The dynamically diverse construction visually frees us from the weight of the gravitation and creates an impression of a light, almost immaterial presence.
Texts by dr. Majda Božeglav Japelj.
