Mario Ceroli (born 1938) is a renowned Italian sculptor and artist best known for his pioneering work in the 1960s with untreated, raw Russian pine wood, shaping the Italian Arte Povera movement.
Mario Ceroli (Italy, Castel Frentano, 1938) draws on matter, manual skill, and the idea of “theatricality” as a “representation of life.” While not being a general catalogue, this monograph provides the first overview of his work from 1955 to 2025. Cesare Biasini Selvaggi’s historical-critical analysis spans seventy years of research, from the ground zero of figuration with figures/silhouettes (his idea of emptying the image and grasping its essential sign through shadow) to the creation of spatial-architectural machines, from scenosculpture—or the relocation of event-space into the theater—to contemporary actionsculpture, and overseas happenings and performances. Some sort of “total sculpture” described by a surprising corpus of photographs, followed at the end of the book by the appendices with the lists of solo and group exhibitions; set designs for theater, cinema, and television; installations; essential bibliography.
