Emilio Isgrò

Emilio Isgrò (born October 1937 in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, Sicily) is an Italian artist and writer, known for his use of the erasure technique in his art works.

Isgrò was born in Sicily but he moved to Milan when he was 19. He made his literary debut in 1956 with the poetry collection Fiere del Sud (Arturo Schwarz Editore). In 1964 he first began erasing encyclopaedias and other texts, making his personal contribution to the birth and development of visual poetry and conceptual art. In 1966, during a one-man show at the Galleria Traghetto in Venice, he published Dichiarazione 1, defining his conception of poetry as ‘general art of the sign’. He published the volume of poems L'età della ginnastica (Mondadori).

In 1977 he took part in the Venice Biennale, returning there in 1978, 1986 and 1993. He was one of a group of artists featured in the exhibition Contemporanea (1973), curated by Achille Bonito Oliva in the underground car park of the Villa Borghese in Rome. The following year Isgrò published L'avventurosa: Vita di Emilio Isgrò nelle testimonianze di uomini di stato, scrittori, artisti, parlamentari, attori, parenti, familiari, amici, anonimi cittadini (Il Formichiere), which was nominated for the Strega Prize. In 1976 the first retrospective of his work was held at the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione (CSAC) in Parma. In 1977 he was awarded the first prize at the XIVth Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil. That same year he also published the novel Marta de Rogatiis Johnson (Feltrinelli). In 1979 he presented Chopin, an installation and musical score for 15 pianos, at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan. In 1982 his Gibella del Martirio and San Rocco legge la lista dei miracoli e degli orrori were performed in Gibellina. From the following year and for three consecutive seasons, his Sicilian trilogy Orestea di Gibellina was also performed in Gibellina at the Festival Internazionale delle Orestiadi. In 1985 the Teatro alla Scala commissioned him to create the multimedia installation La veglia di Bach in the San Carpoforo Church in Milan. In 1986 he presented the installation L'ora italiana at the Civic Archaeological Museum in Bologna, commemorating the victims of the terrorist bomb attack at the city’s railway station on 2 August 1980. In 1989 he published the novel Polifemo (Mondadori), at the same time working out a new theory of erasure in Teoria della cancellatura (Galleria Fonte d'Abisso). Isgrò’s work was featured in the exhibition The Artist and the Book in Twentieth-Century Italy held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1992 and in 1994 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. In 1994 he also published the novel L'asta delle ceneri (Camunia) and returned to poetry with the collection Oratorio dei ladri (Mondadori). In 1998 he donated his sculpture Orange Seed to his Sicilian birthplace, the town of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto.

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