"Senza Titolo" Glazed polychrome terracotta. Ceramiche San Giorgio factory, Albisola, 1975. Signed on the front. Ceramiche San Giorgio, Giovanni Poggi, Albisola
Agenore Fabbri, Tuscan sculptor and painter, initially trained by attending the Academy of Florence and the cultural bed of the Caffè Giubbe Rosse, alongside Eugenio Montale and Ottone Rosai. Later, in 1935, he moved to Albisola where he continued his apprenticeship in the ceramists' workshops and undertook a work on the subject of the human and animal figure with a strong expressionistic charge that immediately inserts color into the terracotta. Active with personal exhibitions in Italy and the United States since the 1940s, after personal rooms at the Venice Biennials in 1952 and 1959 he finally arrived in Milan. Still shaken by the recent drama of the Second World War, he exacerbates the expressive drama of his work. Bronze and wood become the materials of choice: the first presents a convulsive modeling, the second a work of breaking surfaces that the polychromy games make even more evident: it is the great season of the Informal that sees the artist among the protagonists of sculpture internationally. The exhibition curriculum is impressive and includes various museums in Europe and the USA. Fabbri is also responsible for important public works in Milan, Pistoia and Savona. In the last phase of his work, the artist returns first to his expressionist matrix and then, from 1981, he discovers the painting that will become pre-eminent during the eighties, until he folds back, in the following decade, on a colorful and joyful re-enactment of the past experience informal which, according to some critics, condenses into an assumption the lesson of one of the most restless post-war artists: "the inconsistency of coherence in absolute freedom".