Alberto Garutti Italian, 1948-2023

Alberto Garutti (Galbiate, Italy, 1948 - Milan, Italy, 2023)

Born in Galbiate, in the province of Milan, in 1948,  after a few years he moved to Milan with his family where he studied at the Faculty of Architecture at the Polytechnic.

Soon after he started his artistic career, thanks to the gallery that represented him well both nationally and internationally.

In 1990, he took part in the Venice Biennale, with a personal exhibition room, where he presented the Orizzonti series. In the same years, he taught at the Brera Academy.

His activity related to the production of public artworks began in the late 1990s, when, in 1997, he realised his first artwork designed for a public space in Fabrica, a hamlet of Peccioli. From then on, the number of public art projects multiplied.

From 1998 to 2003, in fact, he produced public art works in Bergamo, at the S.M.A.K. Museum in Ghent, Belgium, at the Istanbul Art Biennial, in Kanazawa, Japan, and in Bolzano.

His artworks aim to restore the sense of belonging to the community, associating art with nature, preserving, on the one hand, the mystical and mysterious sense and, on the other, linking it to a scientific-technological aspect.

In 2009, the work Temporali was exhibited, first at MAXXI in Rome and then at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin: an imposing chandelier made up of more than 1,000 light bulbs, which light up simultaneously whenever lightning strikes Italy.

The splendour of the light that comes on and takes the imagination to another place. In that instant, distant spaces come closer, the here and now loses consistency,

In 2010, the artworks Tutti i passi che ho fatto nella mia vita hanno portato qui e Opera dedicata a chi passando di qui penserà alle voci e ai suoni della città, in Piazza Gae Aulenti, were installed in the spaces of Malpensa Airport and Cadorna Station in Milan.

And just two years later, the PAC in Milan organised his first retrospective.

In 2017, he won an international competition, which led to the realisation of three monumental public works at the Tenuta Ca' Corniani in 2019. In 2019, he presented the artwork Ai nati oggi in Piazza del Popolo in Rome.

In October 2023, on the occasion of the Giornata del Contemporaneo promoted by AMACI, the permanent work Temporali was inaugurated on the roof of the MAXXI Museum in Rome.

The project of a large monograph on Alberto Garutti's artistic activity, conceived by Germano Celant and supported by 6 important Italian and international museum institutions was published in 2024.

Photo UniCredit Group (Sebastiano Pellion di Persano)