ANGELO CANEVARI
Rooted in Roman traditions and postwar expressionism, Canevari’s sculptures
radiate raw power—evocative, underrecognized works bridging classical form and modern intensity
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ARTIST BIO
Angelo Canevari (Rome, 1929 – Amelia, 2014) was an Italian sculptor whose practice spanned lost-wax bronze casting, ink drawing, and theatrical design. From a lineage of Roman artists active since the seventeenth century, his father having designed the monumental mosaics at the Foro Italico and his uncle having created five statues for the same monumental project, he trained alongside the painter Corrado Cagli and in the studios of the Roman postwar avant-garde before establishing an independent practice that extended across six decades.
His work received critical attention from Enrico Crispolti, Giuseppe Marchiori, and Paolo Portoghesi, among others, and was exhibited in Rome, Milan, and internationally across his career.
His monumental commissions include the bronze doors for the Cathedral of Belluno and a series of coins for the Vatican Mint. His decades-long creative exchange with the novelist and theater director Andrea Camilleri produced both published work and theatrical collaborations.
ABOUT THE WORK
Angelo Canevari melded the sculptural to the painterly and the painterly to the sculptural. His work reminds us of Alberto Burri, who also used diverse materials (like plastic and fabric) to express himself, but stuck to the limits of a four sided plane. Canevari delicately conjoined strips of resin-coated cardboard and metal in his sculpture to evoke figures that are 'archetypes', like Sicilian marionettes. He brings the energetic drawing of a Daumier to the third dimension, using metallic paint to highlight some of their nervous fibers.
Like the Mannerist artists Canevari so admired, he delicately played with appearances; while translucent polyethylene strips in the Neri series trace figures that are all outline and no mass, the body present as edge rather than volume, tense leather panels with rocks placed on their concave surface appear as soft as goose-down bedding.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Inside the artist lives the intuition that together with his inner self can create forms able to express it. A kind of language that, starting from an ancestral culture, can be articulated in an expression, shaping its own history. He will lead back every inspiration to that peculiar interpretative fashion, the only one he can use to read and communicate his ideas and his view of the world around him.
Everything he can capture from his life will be replaced in that perimeter, in that space. Every thought like a single stone will be picked up, interpreted, decoded and placed in the wall of creative construction, like fragments reborn to a new order. Art is the invention capable to manifest, through its continual metamorphose, the never ending process of creativity, the never ending process of life.
PRESENTED AT ARCO GALLERY
Exhibitions:
STRUTTURE (2026)
Featured:
Everything He Knew
Thematic focus:
Figurative Art
You're welcome to reach out for additional works, context, or conversation around Angelo Canevari's practice.