Leoncillo valuation
Italian sculptor who made glazed and coloured clay the material of post-war Informale, cut open with a wire.
Leoncillo Leonardi (1915–1968), known as Leoncillo, was born in Spoleto, in Umbria, and studied at the Istituto d'Arte in Perugia from 1931 to 1935 before moving to Rome, where he studied with Angelo Zanelli at the Accademia di Belle Arti and joined the circle of the Scuola Romana around Libero de Libero's Galleria della Cometa.
What a work by Leoncillo is worth
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Bio
Leoncillo Leonardi (1915–1968), known as Leoncillo, was born in Spoleto, in Umbria, and studied at the Istituto d'Arte in Perugia from 1931 to 1935 before moving to Rome, where he studied with Angelo Zanelli at the Accademia di Belle Arti and joined the circle of the Scuola Romana around Libero de Libero's Galleria della Cometa. In 1939 he returned to Umbria to work with ceramics, and clay, glazed and often brilliantly coloured, became his material for the rest of his life. His early work was figurative and close to the Baroque; after the war he passed through a post-Cubist geometry, and in 1946 he was a founder of the Nuova Secessione Artistica Italiana, which became the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti. From the mid-1950s he made the abstract, Informale sculptures he is best known for, coloured clays layered, torn, folded and sliced through with a wire so that the colour comes from inside the cut, like wounded earth, bark or flesh. He showed at six Venice Biennales between 1948 and 1968, in 1954 in a room shared with Lucio Fontana, and won the Premio Faenza in 1954 and 1964.
Every sculpture is a unique piece of fired clay, and the questions are the ones of ceramics: firing cracks that are part of the work against later breaks, glaze losses, chips and old restoration, which should be looked at in good light and, where needed, by a ceramics conservator. A work's date and exhibition history matter, and provenance through his Roman galleries, La Tartaruga, L'Attico or Odyssia, supports it.
Spoleto, Rome and the Venice Biennale
His first solo exhibition was at the Galleria del Fiore in Florence in 1949, and later shows were held at La Tartaruga in Rome in 1957, the Galleria Blu in Milan in 1960 and the Galleria Odyssia in Rome in 1965, which travelled to its New York gallery.
He also showed at the Milan Triennale of 1940, the Antwerp Biennale in 1953 and 1959 and the Rome Quadriennale in 1955 and 1959.
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