Giorgio Avanti
Born in 1946.
Trained as a lawyer, he worked as an attorney and notary before developing a parallel practice as a painter and writer. Based in the canton of Zug since 1980, he has participated in regional cultural life and served for several years on the committee of the Zuger Kunstgesellschaft. Self-taught, he developed his practice outside art schools, through an ongoing exchange with people from his cultural circle.
He also writes narratives and poems, whose publications accompany the development of his painterly oeuvre.
His painting encompasses, among other subjects, landscape, portraiture and the representation of mountains. The artist’s catalogues document an abundant production of acrylic paintings on canvas, as well as drawings and mixed-media works. Colour occupies a central place in them; Alpine and lakeside views, often recognisable as such, constitute a recurring motif.
This presence in the imagery of the Swiss mountains was attested by his participation in the exhibition «Alpensinfonie. Der Berg in der Kunst», presented in 2022 at the Hans Erni Museum of the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne, alongside artists from different periods and with diverse approaches.
In 2019, the Kornschütte in Lucerne devoted the retrospective «Avanti!» to him; that same year, a permanent space dedicated to his work opened at the Hotel Ochsen in Zug. His works have also been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland. The biographical notice published in his 2021 catalogue records more than two thousand paintings, a figure to be understood as an estimate by the artist and his editorial team.
It also emphasises the link between visual production and writing, characteristic of a practice that brings together painting, drawing and literature.
