Alcamo, 1929 – Milan, 2021

After studying veterinary medicine in Bologna, then law in Palermo, Turi Simeti moved to Rome in 1958 where he attended the workshop of Alberto Burri.

He began to paint and at the same time made long stays in London, Paris, and Basel where he absorbed the international climate of questioning of artistic bases and pictorial traditions. The language he develops, revolves around the concept of table-object, where the canvas is delivered from its notion of simple support.

In the early 1960s, in the wake of Agostino Bonalumi and Enrico Castellani, he produced Legni ovali (Bois ovales) and Cartoni neri (Cartons noirs), where the artist’s thoroughness and rationality are reflected in the association of monochrome in a geometric shape in relief, the ellipse, which will gradually become its trademark.

From 1963, he participated in several European exhibitions: “Arte Visuale” in Florence, “Nouvelle Tendance 3” in Zagreb, “Arte Programmata – Aktuel 65” and “Weiss auf Weiss” in Bern in 1965 and 1966. He moved to Milan in 1965 and was invited to take part in the “ZERO Avant-garde” project in Lucio Fontana’s studio. His first solo exhibition was held the same year at the Wulfengasse Gallery in Klagenfurt in Austria. His work evolves towards a new arrangement of art in relation to space which will lead him to realize in the late 1960s his first Shaped canvases.

In 1971, in line with the climate of artistic contestation, he produced the performance Distruzione di un aliante (Destruction of a glider) at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa. The works of the 1970s have various forms relating to a minimalist poetics, and we are witnessing the scarcity of catching elements of light.

In 1980, the Pinacoteca Comunale di Macerata devoted an exhibition to him. The same year he set up a workshop in Rio de Janeiro allowing him to exhibit in Brazil.
Since the 1990s, Simeti has been developing a language that places the notion of dynamism at the center of its research.

The need to break with the monotony of the surface of the canvas is revealed by the artist in the marginal arrangement of the elements, in sequential or opposite combinations, playing with the reliefs, always in search of perfection.