Mario Comensoli

Mario Comensoli
Mario Comensoli
Born	15 April 1922; Lugano
Died	2 June 1993 (aged 71); Zurich
Nationality	Swiss
Occupation	Painter
Known for	Realist movement

Mario Pasquale Comensoli (15 April 1922 – 2 June 1993) was a Swiss painter. He is considered as leading figure of the realist movement, depicting the social evolution of post-World War II Switzerland with key themes ranging from Italian immigrants to the 1968 social unrest, the Disco years and the hopelessness of the 'No Future' youth.

Biography

Mario Comensoli was born into an Italian immigrant family and grew up in Molino Nuovo. After leaving school, he scraped a living by taking on odd jobs and selling portrait and landscape paintings to tourists. In 1943, when the Municipal Museum of Art (Museo civico di belle arti) in Lugano acquired his landscape painting Piccolo Paesaggio, Comensoli obtained a scholarship from the Fondazione Torricelli, which enabled him to attend classes at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts and lectures at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. In 1944 he met his future wife, Hélène Frei, who died in 1994, and the two married in Basela year later. During his stays in Paris Comensoli became acquainted with Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and the brothers Alberto Giacometti and Diego Giacometti.

In 1953 Mario Comensoli was invited by the Zurich Art Society to exhibit 65 works of art at Zurich’s Helmhaus Museum. The oil paintings, drawings and sculptures essentially summarised his experiences gathered in Paris. Although critics appreciated his post-Cubist works, Comensoli changed his artistic style following a polemical attack in the Parisian weekly newspaper Les lettres françaises and under the influence of some left-wing intellectuals. This gave rise to Comensoli's pictorial cycle Lavoratori in blu (Workers in blue), a series of oil paintings that consistently focused on craftsmen from the south who had immigrated to Switzerland in the 1950s in search of work, whom the painter depicted in blue working clothes and in everyday situations.

Encouraged by the writers Carlo Levi and Saverio Strati, Comensoli took his paintings to Rome. At the "Galleria San Luca" he encountered Renato Guttuso, a painter and master of Italian socialist realism with whom he had a heated discussion. Guttuso criticised him for his lack of political vision and the little elegiac nature of his characters. However, Comensoli did not seek to be a political painter. His intention was rather to show the poetry in the marginalised figures of society, who for him represented the new aesthetic. In 1970, Italian immigrants in Switzerland awarded him with the "Nicolao della Flüe" prize for the solidarity aspects of his work, an honour he shared with Max Frisch and the director Alexander Seiler. In these years, Comensoli's painting, while remaining strictly figurative and indifferent to the artistic imperatives of the "Constructivists" dominating the Zurich scene, dealt with the characteristic topics of the 1968 protests, incorporating the stylistic influences of Pop Art.

The last change in Mario Comensoli's work came at the beginning of the 1980s, when the artist, a keen observer of the world of outsiders, unsparingly depicted the scenes of the punks, squatters and drug addicts who populated the so-called "Needle Park" behind the Swiss National Museum in Zurich. The result was a bitter one, characterised by a deep and existential empathy. These pictures of the "No Future Generation" were among those shown to an international audience at the exhibition in honour of Comensoli at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1989. On 2 June 1993, at the age of 71, Mario Comensoli died of a heart attack in his studio on Rousseaustrasse in Zurich.

Comensoli’s Pictorial Cycles

1949–1951: Velofahrer
1957–1960: Blauen Periode bzw. Lavoratori in blue
1962–1969: Begegnungen
1968–1978: Pop Art
1979–1983: Discoszene
1983–1987: Bewegte Jugend

Exhibitions (Selection)

During his lifetime

1953: Helmhaus in Zürich
1974: Villa Malpensata in Lugano
1986: Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau
1989: Kunsthaus Zürich

Posthumous exhibitions

1998: Museo d’Arte Moderna in Lugano
2002: Fondazione Mazzotta in Mailand
2003: Museo Cà la Ghironda in Bologna
2006: Palais de Beaulieu in Lausanne
2008: Pinacoteca Casa Rusca in Locarno
2009: Welti modern art in Zürich
2010: PressArt-Museum der Moderne in Salzburg
2011: Cinema Comensoli Vip Pavillon beim Zurich Film Festival
2014: Museo Civico Villa dei Cedri in Bellinzona
2014: Collezione Artrust in Melano (Lugano)
2017/2018: Bernisches Historisches Museum, «1968 Schweiz»
2018: Ludwig Forum in Aachen, «Flashes of the Future»'
2018: Kunstmuseum Olten, «Das Leben ist kein Ponyhof»
2019: Landesmuseum Zürich, «Geschichte Schweiz»
2020: Centro Comensoli, «Die Sammlung Hans Peter Salim» in Zürich
2020: Karl der Grosse, «120 Tage im Rausch in Zürich»
2021: Landesmuseum Zürich, «Frauen Rechte in Zürich»
2022: "La peinture du Mouvement", Centro Comensoli - Zürich
2022: “Gli uomini in blu”, Max Museo / Spazio Officina - Chiasso
2022: “Ultime opere”, Fafa Fine Art - Lugano
2022: ”Finale”, Valley Art - Kemptthal
2023: "Comensoli e la Bregaglia", Sala Viaggiatori - Castasegna
2023: "10. Ten years of Artrust" - Melano

Literature

Anita Siegfried: Die Prinzen der urbanen Wüste. Auf den Spuren von Mario Comensoli. Bilgerverlag, 2023, ISBN 978-3-03762-104-2.
Leben und Leidenschaft. Das Werk des Malers Mario Comensoli. in: Du, Die Zeitschrift der Kultur, Nr. 920, 2023.
In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): Band 1: A–D. E. A. Seemann, Leipzig 1953.
Verein zur Herausgabe des schweizerischen Künstler-Lexikons (Hrsg.): Künstlerlexikon der Schweiz XX. Jahrhundert. Band 1. Huber, Frauenfeld 1958.
Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, Zürich und Lausanne (Hrsg.): Biografisches Lexikon der Schweizer Kunst, Zürich 1998, Band 1.
Der Maler und sein Galerist: Mario Comensoli. G. Maecenas-Verlag, Zug / Baar 1996, ISBN 3-907048-08-3
Aurel Schmidt, Christine Seiler: Mario Comensoli – Begegnungen und Erinnerungen. Versus Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-909066-00-3