Fabrizio Clerici

Fabrizio Clerici (15 May 1913 – 7 June 1993) was an Italian painter.

Clerici was a complex and eclectic artist and was also an architect, costume designer, scenographer and photographer. His works were exhibited in many museums in the United States, including the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum, and in France, such as the Centre Pompidou.

His most renowned works are Il Minotauro accusa pubblicamente sua madre, Sonno romano (1955); Le Confessioni palermitane (1954); Minerva phlegraea (1956–57); Le Krak des Chevaliers (1968).

In 1920 Clerici moved to Rome, where he studied at the Scuola Superiore di Architettura, and obtained an architecture degree in 1937. The Roman monuments, architecture and paintings from the Italian Renaissance and the baroque period considerably influence him, as did certain religious works, due to their spectacular aspect. Later, Sonno romano (1955) would reawaken those memories. In Rome he attended conferences by Le Corbusier, and in 1936 he became a friend of Alberto Savinio; they admired each other's work. In 1938 he met Giorgio de Chirico in Milan. At the end of the 1930s he made his first dreamlike and fantastic paintings, based on his memory of events, locations and persons transformed by the filter of time. Through his reconstruction of images, Clerici evolved naturally towards surrealism. However, the actual motive of Clerici remained metaphysical.

Upon his return to Rome after the Second World War he closely perused the scientific studies of Athanasius Kircher, Erhard Schön and Jean François Niceron. In 1944 he wrote an article in the review Quadrante describing his meeting with Leonor Fini. In January 1945 he and Savinio participated in a collective exhibition. In 1947 he collaborated with Lucio Fontana in the project Patio per una casa al mare, for Handicraft Development, Inc. in New York. Until 1948, Clerici continued to produce drawings and engravings; in 1949 he produced large-scale paintings in which architecture was the major harmonic component. Later he travelled to the Middle East — Egypt, Syria and Jordan — as well as to Libya and Turkey. From those travels Clerici developed two themes: the "mirages" and the "temples of the egg", cycles of constructions set in the desert and spiralling from a central core containing a hypothetical primordial egg.

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