Gianfranco Asveri Italy, b. 1948

Born in Fiorenzuola d’Arda in 1948, Asveri lives and works on the hills near Piacenza with his dogs.

He has neither attended art academies nor studied art in other ways, but after a difficult childhood and adolescence he began painting in 1969, finding a reason for living in art.

After an initial period in which he expressed himself with a traditional figurative language, since the eighties his painting has acquired a more instinctive and personal gesture, rich in colour and material, close to the expressionism of Art Brut.

Characterized by an instinctive and emotional pictorial style, Asveri approaches the surface with a powerful and primitive gesture, which he nevertheless combines with other, less perceptible expressive matrixes, like the memory of artistic images.

Profound and vital, Asveri’s painting is inspired by an observation of reality: the animals the artist gathers and takes care of, lives with and loves more than anything else, to whom he dedicates his drawings, paintings and poems.

The economic newspaper “Il Sole 24 Ore” recently listed him among the ten most important artists of the Italian market.

Several critics have written about him, including Luca Beatrice, Paolo Blendiger, Luciano Caprile, Maurizio Corgnati, Elda Fezzi, Flaminio Gualdoni, Elisabetta Longari, Lorenzo Kame|, Nicoletta Pallini, Elena Pontiggia, Giovanni Quaglino, Mauro Rosci, Giovanni Seveso, the poet Ferdinando Cogni, Ivana D’Agostino and Claudio Vela.