submitted on Wed, 11/28/2007 - 13:30 in Mario Lamorgese Niche by Asher Remy 
Mario Lamorgese was born in Naples in November of 1957. From childhood he showed a marked propensity for art and aesthetics matters, indirectly nourished perhaps by his father’s profession in the industrial paint sector. When he moved to Rome as a youth, he began to paint, influenced by the modes of gestural and informal art, combining his own work in painting with that of scene-painter in the fringe theatres of the city. He exhibited for the first time as a seventeen year-old, at the Museum of Rome in Braschi Palace in a selection of undergraduate work.
In 1976 he graduated from the Secondo national art school, while in the late '70s his work moved progressively toward more formal points of references in the aesthetic context of mathematic and geometrical thinking.
In this period, while enrolled in courses at the Fine Art Academy first and then those of the History of Contemporaneous Art at the Sapienza University, by making the most of small commissions, he spent some years first in the Americas and later in the Far East, exhibiting on varied occasions when he made the choice for spaces alternative to those of the established milieux of Art, an attitude he was to persevere with in defiant fashion also in the years to come.
Though never cut off from the artistic ferments in Rome, he only returned there definitively in the late '80s, working mainly in the advertising sector with salutary excursions into cinema as designer. Only from late '80s, not least as a result of valuable recognition and requests for commissioned works, he moved entirely into the Art sphere. In 1990 he began to work with the Toselli Gallery in Milan, with which, through interaction with various film makers. The Cornucopia and other significant works date from the early '90s, almost always shown in non-institutional spaces.
His definitive advent in the public sphere came later in 1996 with the show “18 aspetti della Natura (Umana)” [18 aspects of (human) nature] held at Department of Mental Health in Rome and presented by Giovan Battista Salerno. In 1997 his one-man show, “Orgia colorata + champagne = ambiente” [Coloured orgy + champagne = environment], was curated by Laura Cherubini at the Galleria del Cortile in Rome. In 1999 the critic Achille Bonito Oliva curated, in the Ancient Chancellery of La Valletta on the island of Malta, his one-man show “Malthus”, a singular homage to the famous demographer and economist Robert Malthus, in a paradoxical linguistic correlation between the statistico-mathematical sciences and geometric progression, between modular decoration and contemplation.
In 2000 in Beirut (Lebanon) he had a one-man show, “Fragments”, again curated by Bonito Oliva, in two locations, the city Auditorium and a well-known antiquarian gallery, where despite the post-war turbulence, he exhibited 60 works overall.
A one-man show, “Con 3 inediti di Leoncillo Leonardi” [With three unexhibited works by Leoncillo Leonardi] also took place in 2000 at the Riparte gallery in Rome.
Again in 2002 he created for a private commission, and exclusively by manual techniques, a vast paving in majolica then put on display with a text by Achille Bonito Oliva in the one-man show “Insula” at the Greek Abbey of San Nilo in Grottaferrata.
In 2004, curated by Ada Lombardi, he held the one-man show “Repertorio” at the National Institute of Statistics of Bucharest (Romania), which then travelled, with the backing of the Italian Institute of Culture, to other cities throughout the country. “Repertorio” was then also exhibited in Rome, again in 2004, at the “Vetrina Contemporanea” Gallery and in 2007 at the stand of the same gallery at the Bologna Art Fair.
Among the various collective exhibitions at which he has showed are “Arte a Stella” (2001), “Qualcosa sulla Terra” [Something on the Earth] (2003), “Argentarte - corrispondenze contemporanee in terra di Toscana” [Argentate - contemporary correspondences in Tuscan soil] (2005), “Multiplus” (2007), held in Tuscany.
“Lamorgese, Nunzio e Simoni” was held in 2002, while in 2006 he showed in “Circonferenza Cosmica”, both put on by the “Vetrina Contemporanea” Gallery in Rome.
Mario Lamorgese lives and works in Italy, between Rome and Tuscany.
