Lugano
Osvaldo Licini was born in 1894 in Monte Vidon Corrado, a small town in the Marche region of Italy. In 1908, at just fourteen years old, he moved to Bologna to attend the Academy of Fine Arts, where he formed a friendship with fellow student Giorgio Morandi. During this period, Futurism was at its peak: although Licini was intrigued by it, he chose not to join the movement.
In 1914, his work was exhibited publicly for the first time in the Secessionist collective show held in the basement of the Hotel Baglioni in Bologna, alongside artists such as Bacchelli, Morandi, Pozzati, and Vespignani.
Later that year, he moved to Florence to study sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, but the outbreak of World War I soon disrupted his plans. He served in the war and sustained a serious leg injury. During his recovery, he joined his family in Paris, where he came into contact with leading figures of the European avant-garde, including Picasso, Cocteau, Kisling, and Modigliani. He exhibited his work at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, and took part in Les Artistes Italiens de Paris, curated by Mario Tozzi.
In 1926, he participated in the Novecento Italiano exhibition organized by Margherita Sarfatti at the Palazzo della Permanente in Milan. That same year, he returned to his hometown of Monte Vidon Corrado, where he focused on formal research and artistic experimentation. He studied and reinterpreted the pictorial language of Cézanne and Matisse, avoiding any derivative approach.
In the early 1930s, he became increasingly interested in the new currents of abstract art emerging across Europe, particularly the Abstraction-Création group in Paris. In 1934, he exhibited at the Rome Quadriennale with a group of Italian abstract painters associated with the Galleria del Milione in Milan, where he also held his first solo exhibition in Italy the following year. His commitment to abstraction grew so strong that he destroyed or repainted many of his earlier works.
In 1950, he presented nine paintings at the 25th Venice Biennale, where the enigmatic and recurring figure of Amalassunta appeared for the first time — a mysterious presence Licini sometimes identified as the personification of the moon. In the following years, he received significant critical acclaim and continued to paint with increasing expressive freedom, expanding the unique style he had developed in previous decades.
Osvaldo Licini died in 1958 in his hometown. In 1986, the Osvaldo Licini Study Center was founded to preserve and promote his artistic legacy.