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Sergio Sermidi 1937-2011

Born in Mantua. After attending the local Institute of Art, he completed his studies at the Venturi Institute of Modena, under Luigi Spazzapan, and then briefly attended the Academy of Brera, where he studied painting under Pompeo Borra.  

After initial forays into Surrealism, Sermidi abandoned figurative art virtually straight away.  In the second half of the 1970s, he was first inspired by the study of the perceptive phenomenon, harmony of form and colours of Dalaunay and Kupka, creating gestural works that took their inspiration from the American action paintings of Pollock and Tobey, mediated by the attention to colour of Tancredi and Dorazio.  

After a number of one-man exhibitions, in the summer of 1970 he participated in Pittura ’70: l’immagine attiva (Mantua, Casa del Mantegna) collective; featuring works by Claudio Olivieri, Mario Raciti and Valentino Vago amongst others, all of whom were friends and acquaintances.

At this time, his works reduced the specifics of pictorial language, sign and colour to its very minimum: meshed dynamics cut through the canvas as if striving to free themselves from the surface upon which they are contained, like embryonic forms uniting to escape primal chaos.

In the immediately successive works, the obsessive rigour and maniacal arrangement of the finest wefts that take up all available space appear on one hand to impart a rational order and follow a logical progression, and paradoxically on the other, to increase the light-headed feeling of emptiness.

Around the 1980s, vertical tear-like furrows covered the surface. Lacerations from which light and dispersions of magma energy are filtered. 

In the 1990s the hand gradually evolved to be freer, more curved and at the same time the surface, once a field of subterranean tensions, it is now diluted and toned down. After the battle to escape chaos, from the abyss of the indistinct, the artist appears to want to testify to the sweetness of surrender, the mooring in the bed of mater natura, the plummeting of the sea of the infinite. 

In the 2000s, the artist becomes even freer and dialogues through slivers of light that appear and extend in a body of colour, abolishing surrounding space with unexpected linear twists that follow the movement of time. 

The museums housing his works include: