Pinetta Colonna-Gamero

The painter Pinetta Colonna was born into a cultivated upper middle-class family. Her father made a career as a chemist becoming professor and director of the institute for chemistry at the university. The girl was educated in music and painting, but she also became acquainted with architecture. Her interest in art was further fostered by her parents’ friendship with Italian painter Giovanni Guarlotti. In his studio she met – at the age of seventeen – her future husband Mario Gamero, with whom she developed a congeniality. The couple married in 1934 and together they opened a studio. She was quite successful during the time prior to World War II with exhibitions in Turin, Rome and Bologna, at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and in Paris in 1937. Her paintings from this period were still affected by the late Art Deco, serene and with clear colors.

After the end of the war, Pinetta Colonna-Gamero took up teaching at secondary schools and also founded and ran a painting school in her own studio. She developed a more expressionistic style with harder and darker colors. With no own children her pictures became concerned with grief and death and she later painted dark looming industrial structures in Turin. She painted until her last days. Probably both of her entries are oil paintings, which were created in 1934 or 1935.