Salvo (artist)

Salvatore Mangione, known as Salvo (22 May 1947 – 12 September 2015), was an Italian artist who lived and worked in Turin.

Salvo was born in Leonforte in 1947. After having spent his early childhood in Sicily, in 1956 he and his family moved from Catania to Turin. In 1963 he participated in the 121st exhibition of the Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti. He painted and tried to sell portraits, copied from Rembrandt and Van Gogh and from Fontana to Chagall.

From September to December 1968, he was in Paris, drawn by the cultural climate that flourished around the student movement. Back in Turin, he began to meet with a group of young artists involved in the Arte Povera, that gathered around Gian Enzo Sperone's gallery in Piazza Carlo Alberto. Here, he met Alighiero Boetti, with whom he would become friends, as well as Mario Merz, Gilberto Zorio, Giuseppe Penone and art critics such as Renato Barilli, Germano Celant and Achille Bonito Oliva. In 1969, he had contact with American conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth and Robert Barry, and he also met Sol LeWitt, who would buy some of his works, including the "Occupazione del sapiente letterato (Occupation of the wise man of letters)" tombstone.

In the summer, he traveled extensively through Afghanistan. He engaged in works that already display certain tendencies of his – the search for himself, narcissistic self-gratification, relationships with the past and with the history of culture – which would all become important themes of his subsequent research. In the "12 autoritratti (12 self portraits)" series, he used photomontages to apply his face to pictures clipped from newspapers.

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