However it is not so: history is littered with characters endowed with such overwhelming creative charge as to need additional avenues to express themselves”.
– Alessandra Redaelli
Giorgio Laveri was born in Savona and since when he was young began to devote himself to cinema and theatre. During the course of his career he signed to 52 theatre pieces and 23 feature films.
From the end of the ’70s he began to translate his cinematographic experience into the field of artistic experimentation, thus landing on sculpture and making friends with ceramics and with the nearby factories of Albisola, a place whose noble artistic tradition is known and appreciated all over the world.
During the course of his long career he has taken part in more than one hundred events, presenting his work not only in Italy but abroad in private galleries and important public spaces and museums: from France, to Switzerland, Hong Kong, Korea and Montecarlo.
Laveri is an artist trained in multidisciplinarity, creator of performance, installations and artistic creations developed within a balanced mix of figurative and thematic ideas, as well as persuasive scenographic aspects and expressive clarity. His medium of choice remains third fire glazed ceramic, a complex and sophisticated technique that he has mastered like few others and that he intertwines with cinema and theatre, in the chosen subjects as well as in the means of presenting them to the public.
From December 2016 to January 2017, on the occasion of the 45th year of his career, Laveri was the protagonist in Savona, Albissola Marina and Albisola Superiore of an anthological exhibition entitled “Della Ceramica del cinema e del teatro… e di Giorgio Laveri”, curated by Giorgia Cassini. The exhibition, with its unequivocal title, has tried to synthesize precisely the multifaceted nature of the artist: in Giorgio Laveri’s work ceramic production is always connected to cinema and theatre, and can never be (or almost never) separated from it.
Here a video of an interview to Laveri in 2011 where he talks about his poetics.
GIANT SCULPTURES
Koons has also made hedonism and glitter his signature, but it is difficult to imagine a “beyond” behind pieces like the Rockefeller Center ballerina, or behind the Rabbit.”
– Alessandra Redaelli
In Laveri’s artworks emerge both the ironic side and the artist’s design expertise, while revealing the creative path that leads from the function to creation, then to decoration and finally to emotion. His sculptures reinterpret the noble art of ceramics in a playful and pop key, offering ironic and irreverent “giant images of everyday life”.
The favorite subject of Laveri’s imagination is everyday reality declined in deliberately off-scale subjects. Lipsticks, cherries, clothes pegs, fountain pens, cameras, sharpeners… tanks.
Explicit references to the 20th century art. The works recall both the poetics of Duchamp’s ready-made and the American Pop Art, synthesized in ceramic works that become examples of the excellence in Italian craftsmanship.
Laveri’s critical celebration of consumerism is conveyed by the images and titles of his works: the irony and desire for reflection actively involve the observer who, captured by the bright surfaces, finds himself trapped between imagination and an interior reflection.
Among the most emblematic creations of the artist’s “giant” production we must mention the series “Una tira l’altra”, enormous fleshy cherries, the one of the “Truka”, composed of iconic extra-large lipsticks, up to the colorful “Mollywood”, hyper-colored clothes pegs that interpret reality in a ludic way, like snapshots inspired by an (extra)ordinary everyday life. Or the giant Styló, cartoon-inspired fountain pens.
These third-fire ceramics are bearer of secrets, tales, personal memories and shared symbolism, despite the apparent glam patina on their surface: Truka is glamour, seduction, beauty icon, however it is also mask, fiction, fear of showing one’s true face.
In 2019 Laveri was one of the protagonist of the group show Lollipop with which PUNTO SULL’ARTE presented to the public renovated and doubled in size. A colourful, joyful and effervescent exhibition whose fil rouge was Neopop.
PERFORMANCE
Artist trained in multidisciplinarity, from ceramic, to cinema and theatre, Laveri has always made artistic experimentation and, since 1972, he has taken part in more than one hundred events all over the world.
There are many examples that can be mentioned. We have selected Ciliegiotto, an artistic performance held in Padua in 2014, where Laveri has chosen to bring art among people,with the intent as generous as it was astonishing to dispel the excessive awe and reverence towards art.
Fifty red cherries invaded some of the historic places of the city, such as Palazzo della Ragione and Piazza dei Signori, while unsuspecting passers-by, amazed and then amused, were invited to collect them.
On this occasion he made four starry cherries as an homage to Giotto’ skies and the fresco in the Cappella degli Scrovegni.
BIOGRAPHY
Giorgio Laveri was born in Savona in 1953. After his professional training in television directing, in 1974 he began to devote himself to cinema and theatre. During the course of his career he signed to 52 theatre pieces and 23 feature films, also collaborating with Swiss television. From the end of the ’70s he began to translate his cinematographic experience into the field of artistic experimentation, thus landing on sculpture and making friends with ceramics and with the nearby factories of Albisola, a place whose noble artistic tradition is known and appreciated all over the world.
In 1993 he founded the Mediterranean Artistic Movement together with friend and artist Patrick Moya: the movement aimed to promote ceramic art and in the following years he worked on the definitive drafting of the First Manifesto of Mediterranean Ceramics.
During the course of his long career he has taken part in more than one hundred events, presenting his work not only in Italy but also abroad in private galleries and important public spaces and museums: from the Complesso Monumentale del Pramàr in Savona to the Château-Musée Renoir in Cagnes sur Mer and the Palais de la Méditerranée in Nice in France, from Montecarlo to Florida, Hong Kong to Korea. For more than fifteen years he has participated in almost all the main trade fairs in the sector in Italy and abroad. Over the course of his career he has received important awards in the artistic sector, including the Premio alla Carriera (Lifetime Achievement Award) in 2016 from the Nobile Contrada del Nicchio and Associazione Arte Vasai di Siena (Art Potters Association of Siena). His works are in private and public collections all over the world. He lives and works in Savona.