"His distinctive style - rich, instinctive, sun-drenched and almost childlike - has made the artist famous around the world."
Gianfranco Asveri was born in 1948 into a farming family in Fiorenzuola d'Arda, in the province of Piacenza, Italy. Entirely self-taught, he began painting in 1969, and art soon became the central purpose of his life. He first exhibited in 1976 at Galleria La Bottega in Fidenza, when the Impressionists, Gauguin and Van Gogh were still his points of reference. Through the 1980s and 1990s his work evolved into something distinctly his own: an instinctive, richly material style close to Art Brut, built up from thick layers of oil paint mixed with marble dust.
In Asveri's paintings, his own life is the guiding thread. He paints direct experiences and impressions, or returns to cherished memories of people, animals and moments. His colourful, poetic work echoes the ideals of the CoBrA group and Art Informel: an emphasis on raw material, a nostalgia for primitivism, and an unguarded, almost childlike openness. About his process, Asveri has said: "Matter is poetry. You don't need to intervene, you can simply feel it. Colour, on the other hand, is skin: you look at it. Matter is skin with flesh underneath it; it evokes an irresistible urge to touch it."
His breakthrough onto the international market came in the late 1980s, with solo and group exhibitions across Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Denmark. In December 1996, the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore named Asveri one of the ten most important artists on the Italian art market. Over the following decades his work was shown extensively throughout Italy - in Milan, Rome, Turin, Cremona, Pietrasanta and Piacenza, among many others - as well as at institutions including the Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna in Gallarate and the Palazzo Reale in Milan.
Dogs, his lifelong companions at his home in the hills of Gasperini near Castell'Arquato, are a recurring presence throughout his paintings, drawings and poems, most of which are dedicated to them. In 2024, the town of Castell'Arquato honoured Asveri with the major solo exhibition Favole da cortile at the Palazzo del Podestà - some thirty works spanning 2011 to 2024, seventeen years after the town's first exhibition dedicated to its celebrated native son.
Asveri has worked with MPV Gallery for many years, with solo presentations including Memorie (2011), Guardami, amo te! (2010) and Nieuwe Verhalen (2007).