Fulvia Levi Bianchi

On Wednesday, 2 April 2025, Tommaso Calabro inaugurates "Fulvia Levi Bianchi" at its Milan gallery in Corso Italia 47.
Born in Trieste in 1927 but moved during her childhood to Milan, where she studied and later attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Fulvia Levi Bianchi (1927–2006) was a key figure in Milan's vibrant art scene during the second half of the 20th century. Starting in the 1960s, Fulvia Levi Bianchi explored drawing, painting, and sculpture with fervor and endless curiosity, engaging in continuous dialogue and exchange with some of the most important artists, critics, and gallerists of the time, including Lucio Fontana, Pierre Restany, and Alexander Iolas, with whom she exhibited between 1971 and 1983 in Milan, Athens, Paris, and New York.

The exhibition at Tommaso Calabro features around thirty paintings and works on paper created by Fulvia Levi Bianchi between the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. During this decade, marked by her greatest artistic maturity, Levi Bianchi transitioned from works still visibly linked to the study of Surrealism and from graphic art to an organic painting style, rich in symbolism yet intimate and personal. During these years, Levi Bianchi produced her first eggs and breasts, two iconographic elements that would accompany her throughout her future work, becoming her best known and most recognisable signature. Archetypes of creation and life, representations of a cosmic energy without origin that flows infinitely, the egg and the breast are not merely an excuse for a stylistic exercise but serve as a constant practice that is above all a reflection on the mystery and meaning of life. Indeed, it is Levi Bianchi herself who wonders whether the events of her life, her childhood joys and pains, led her towards certain images. The egg and the breast are also a manifesto of a distinctly feminine art.

They are, in fact, internal and external references to the female body, both metaphors of genesis, but above all testimony to metamorphosis. Despite the delicacy of Levi Bianchi's painting, characterized by the layering of extremely thin veils of color that give her works an ethereal, almost sacred dimension, the artist does not shy away from giving her subjects, especially the breasts, a distinct materiality, physical presence, and sensuality. Through her painting, Levi Bianchi creates images of great evocative power, suspended between the real and the abstract, between the surreal and the metaphysical. With the exhibition "Fulvia Levi Bianchi," Tommaso Calabro continues the exploration of some of the most representative names in Post-war Italian art, celebrating an artist who stood out for her personal and collectively valuable artistic research, without compromising with the trends of the moment.