Emile Gilioli - Original Bronze Sculpture 1962 Edition: 5/5 Dimensions: 41.9 x 34.3 x 20.3 cm Reference: Giovanni Carandente, ''Gilioli'', Edizioni Stendhal, Milan, 1980, page 86 Gilioli was one of the leaders of lyrical abstraction in French sculpture in the 1950s alongside Brancusi and Arp. He designed the Résistance memorial on the Glières plateau (Haute-Savoie). Emile Gilioli was born on 10th June 1911 in Paris, into a family of Italian shoemakers living on the banks of Canal Saint-Martin. He learned the blacksmith's art during his childhood, when on holiday in his paternal family near Mantoue. At the end of the First World War, the Gilioli family moved closer to Italy, setting up home in Nice. The young Emile worked in the family business and at the same time took classes in the town's decorative arts school. In 1928, he started working for a sculptor, for whom he worked for two years before joining the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris on a scholarship. He frequented Jean Boucher's workshop where, like many artists of his generation, he was influenced by the work of Charles Malfray. Drafted in 1939, he was sent to Grenoble, where he stayed until the Liberation. There he made friends with Andry-Fracy, curator of the museum from 1919 to 1949, who passed on his interest for cubism and introduced him to the painter, Closon, a pioneer of French abstraction. It was in Grenoble that he put on his first private exhibition in Gallery Laforge in 1945. When he returned to Paris, he managed the new abstract school in Paris with Poliakoff and Deyrolle, and exhibited work in Gallery Breteau in 1946. He took part in several French and foreign art events: Salon des Réalités nouvelles in 1947, frequently exhibited his work at the Salon de Mai and at the Salon de la Jeune Sculpture. The Galliera museum dedicated an exhibition to him in 1968. The same year, he exhibited his conception of art in La Sculpture (published by Robert Morel). The simplicity of this art, where form and material are mutually dependent, inspired by archaic Greek, Ancient Egyptian statues, and Cubism, earned him many public orders, notably in the Isère département where he made the Voreppe Memorial in 1946, the war memorial for the deportees of Grenoble in 1950, the Chapelle-en-Vercors monument in 1951, the incumbent statue of Vassieux-en-Vercors in 1952, the Résistance memorial on the Glières plateau in 1973. An insatiable worker, Gilioli created Prière et Force, a concrete sculpture to which he devoted himself from 1959 to 1963, La Mendiante (1962), Apparition de la Vierge à Bernadette (1964), a fountain for Grenoble town hall (1968). His bronze works include his Compositions et Formes, Cadran Solaire, Soleil sur la montagne, Histoire crétoise, Divinité, Tête siennoise. Working with marble, he sculpted Abstraction, L'Homme oiseau, Chloe, Tabernacle and Forme Abstraite. His gouache and watercolour paintings reveal a Composition for the Glières monument. Also worthy of note: Composition bleu, rouge et noir (collage), Vitesse (steel), Composition transparente (mesh), Portrait de femme (charcoal). The works of Emile Gilioli are exhibited all over the world, notably: Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, Tate Gallery in London, Musée de Sculpture de Plaen Air de Middelheim in Antwerp, Museo de Arte Moderna in Sao-Paulo, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Bezabel Museum in Jerusalem, Musée de Peinture et de Sculpture in Grenoble, Fine Arts Museum in Ostend, Musée National d'Histoire et d'Art in Luxembourg, Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris, Musée de Sculpture de la Ville de Paris, Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dunkirk, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, Museo dei Bozzetti Pietrasanta, Kunsthaus in Zurich, Musée Fabre Montpellier. One of his workshops, ''his attic'', in a building acquired by the municipality of Saint Martin de la Cluze in 1997, has remained intact since his death and is now open to the public.
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