Italian sculptor Leoncillo Leonardi was the son of the poet Fernando Leonardi. Leoncillo studied at the Art Institute in Perugia and at the Art Academy Roma. There, he also worked as a drawing teacher and came into contact with artists who opposed the official concept of art. During World War II he joined the Italian partisans. He worked for a ceramics company in Umbria, mostly with terracotta. His creations were typically large polychrome ceramics, often with an expressionistic figurative intent. In addition, he always published drawings. From 1942-1952 Leonardi taught ceramic sculpturing at the Istituto statale d’arte in Rome. From 1946 he had a studio in the Villa Massimo and had his first solo exhibitions. Leonardi produced several ceramics charting the passage from his neo-Cubist period of the late 1940s to his participation in Italy’s explosion of Arte Informale, which was to have considerable influence in Europe and America. He was a co-founder of the New Artistic Secession in 1946 and is considered Italy’s most important informal sculptor. One of his most famous works is the Monument to the Dead Soldiers of All Wars in Albissola Marina in Liguria from 1955. The Lottatori, created in 1947, is a bas-relief made of glazed multi-colored ceramics. It shows two fighters, one in black and the other in blue and white.
Italy