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Enrico Garff

Enrico Garff

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Enrico Garff

Concept

My first play-ground mate was a tree. I grew up in a rather lonely childhood surrounded by nature in my mother's private garden secluded from the mayhem of the world. My deep connection with nature, combined with the loneliness stimulated my fantasy to build up an imaginary world. The vacuum of a hu...
My first play-ground mate was a tree. I grew up in a rather lonely childhood surrounded by nature in my mother's private garden secluded from the mayhem of the world. My deep connection with nature, combined with the loneliness stimulated my fantasy to build up an imaginary world. The vacuum of a human relationship filled by my growing creativity triggered to fulfil the emptiness with colours, stories, imaginary beings and fantasy shapes. An arid soil was my foundation for a fertile imagination where I developed my artistic perception like a "third eye" shedding light into the darkness. I started early just after overcoming the age of a toddler drawing horses, pirates, Zorro and other marvels. I grew up mainly surrounded by female figures: by the record my mother, my cousins, 9 aunts. My father who was unanimously recognised mastering an outstanding singing voice vanished quite suddenly out of my life. His artistic sensibility is something I although inherited. I can still recall waking up in the morning at the echo of his soothing and harmonious voice sounding in my mind like a warm embrace while singing a beautiful Napolitean tune named la "La Montagna" (the Mountain). However excelling in a different artistic field, I can feel how he transmitted his musical pathos into the touch of my brush through his DNA, influencing my way of painting with the ancient Italic classical heritage still running in my veins. At that time when I still hadn't developed much awareness of my skills and knowledge of what I was doing, the first recognition of my dawning talent came from a Lady deemed to be an art connoisseur by the pictorial circles of the time. I remember how she claimed to notice already plenty of action and dynamos embedded in my early stage drawing and painting attempts. In my nineteens, I learnt to appreciate the French impressionists and then the renaissance masters, especially Masaccio. Driven by passion and total devotion to shape and colours my pictorial ability took a remarkable leap towards a constant growing inspiration. I didn't paint to chase fame, accolades nor money, left alone one exception when at the age of 14, I remember that a compelling thought popped up from nowhere: I didn't want to end up my life anonymously or die without leaving a legacy to the world. Surely I yearned to be remembered for having delivered during my existence something of substantial value to humanity. In the late 80s, I started a classical Greek-inspired cycle, portraying scenarios with sculptures in a wide range of styles, including Classical, Hellenistic, Minoic and Cycladic art. The inspiration gained from the full immersion in those historical eras was overwhelmingly corroborating: the statues appeared to take life under my brush while the mystical atmosphere of those eras captured my soul in rapture. I never lacked the inspiration, to be honest, but during that period the creative flow was so powerful that I perceived it as an uncontrolled flow of energy streaming down to the painting. In conjunction with that blessed inspirational connection, I was practising a spiritual discipline regarding the "liberation of the thought". A meditational technique based on disciplining the clarity of thinking according to Rosenkreutz methods and Aristotelic standards. The discipline stands in between the Hindustan Yoga and western logic and reason. The encounter with Lassi Nummi and Riita Harjunen wasn't by chance. They were both on the same wavelength and on a similar spiritual pathway. A common purpose united us regarding inner freedom, liberty and independent thinking. In Marc' Aurelius eyes I could see the tragic of the ancient world, the incapability of the human being, trapped into subjectivity to reach a higher consciousness and develop a more objective insight. The objectivity of a crystal clear reason controlling the overemotional wave. Today his message is more than ever of the actual importance: the survival of our civilization based on evidence, reason, liberty is heavily compromised. My favourite artworks have secret meaning and logic: the meeting point between earth and heaven. "Five persons walk in the night", "The future is coming towards us", "Sintesi", "La Domenica delle Palme", are my most representative paintings forming the backbone of my core artistic values. I won't pretend to reach the heart of every person on earth. I hope my contribution to the art will add an objective standard of beauty and aesthetics reflecting the necessity of objectivity in the modern world, to counterbalance the fallacy of relativism and subjectivity of the postmodern world vision. Predictions on the trajectory of the art market are hard to make but coherently to my previous statements, I wish that the art market inflated by subjective evaluations due to the subjectivism of relativism that hijacked the art will get back to common sense. I think that western culture and Indian culture have much in common. A continuous exchange of values has been enriching each other through centuries. West and east still need each other if they want to continue to thrive. From So Cultures Magazine interview the World of Enrico Garff

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Find 8 original artworks & painters by Enrico Garff. Check out Enrico Garff's profile, artwork prices, exhibition information, and buy art online.

“Enrico Garff's Artworks”

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Omaggio a Michael Jordan - Tribute to Michael Jordan

USD 185,000.00 Year.1995 w80.00 x h100.00 x d1.50 cm

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Vento alle Hawaii - Hawaiian Wind

USD 185,000.00 Year.1997 w100.00 x h80.00 x d1.50 cm

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Self Portait in Starry Sky

USD 185,000.00 Year.2003 w33.00 x h41.00 x d0.40 cm

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The mezzo Soprano Jenny Carlstedt

USD 85,000.00 Year.2002 w60.00 x h60.00 x d2.10 cm

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The Leopard

USD 170,000.00 Year.2008 w63.00 x h35.00 x d0.80 cm

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The 3 Sea-Maidens

USD 153,000.00 Year.2003 w57.90 x h31.00 x d0.40 cm

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Il Duetto (The Duett)

USD 45,000.00 Year.2004 w50.00 x h60.00 x d1.90 cm

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Tibetani sul Lago (Tibetans on the Lake)

USD 70,000.00 Year.2003 w70.00 x h50.00 x d1.40 cm

Medium

Price Range

USD $45,000 ~ $185,000

Biography

Source Wikipedia

Enrico Garff (26 November 1939 - 1 September 2024) is an Italian portrait painter and colourist. Garff has worked as an artist in Positano, Sorrento, Rome, Sicily and in Sweden and Finland.

The Maestro was born in 1939 in Rome.
The Maestro Enrico Garff an Italian colorist pai...
Source Wikipedia

Enrico Garff (26 November 1939 - 1 September 2024) is an Italian portrait painter and colourist. Garff has worked as an artist in Positano, Sorrento, Rome, Sicily and in Sweden and Finland.

The Maestro was born in 1939 in Rome.
The Maestro Enrico Garff an Italian colorist painter of the 21st century.
Garff's works include oils, watercolours, acrylics, gouaches and paintings on silk. His favourite themes are humans, horses and mythology. His art can be found in the homes of many a lover of art and horses in Finland, in addition to some works displayed in public buildings. The artist's largest work in oils is seven metres wide. In Hufvudstadsbladet Helena Husman gives a thorough description of this painting ‘Sons of the Sun’ which is collocated at the Kamp Social Services Centre in Helsinki. This pictorial ode to mythology and joy is painted on five canvases and was inaugurated in 2003 together with the second portrait of President Martti Ahtisaari.[1] Opening speeches for this event were conducted by Ms Eeva Ahtisaari and by the artist's wife, Ms Isabella Diana Gripenberg.

Biography
Enrico Garff was born in Rome, Italy in 1939 as a true ‘figlio d’arte’. His father, Emilio Boffi, was an opera singer whose career, however, was impaired by his nervous disposition. His mother, Gertrud Garff, the daughter of a Swedish pharmacist, had arrived in Rome to study lyrical singing.[2] She had already managed to perform with the "King of Baritones", Mattia Battistini but her career too ended in tragedy as she lost her fine operatic voice virtually overnight.

Enrico Garff, an autodidact, started drawing at the age of six. From the very beginning he always regarded himself as a painter. "I have continued to paint and draw throughout my life. A picture should be a living entity and children are instinctively aware of this. The most important feature in depicting a horse is movement and in many classical music scores one can detect the tempo of the trot and the gallop."[3]

At the age of 19, Garff began to exhibit his oeuvres in collaboration with experienced artists in Via Massaciuccoli and Via Margutta where many of his works were immediately sold. Nevertheless, he resisted the temptation to make his art his sole profession. He continued his studies in humanities and in 1969 took his degree at the L'Orientale", Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale" and wrote his doctoral thesis on the Swedish poet Carl Snoilsky.

In 1970 Garff married the Finnish Baroness Isabella Diana Gripenberg who was the granddaughter of the poet Bertel Gripenberg. Isa Gripenberg, Isabella Diana's mother reported: "Shortly after my daughter Diana's arrival in Rome she and I participated in a party that had been arranged for young people. Suddenly a young man appeared who was so pleasant and handsome that I could not help the feeling in my heart that this man, who would be an ideal husband for Diana, could not possibly be single and unattached. A little later when I mentioned to the Italian speaking party that Diana wished to learn Italian from a specialized language teacher, a man answered, almost at once, in perfect Swedish that he occasionally gave private lessons. That man was the one I had noticed as he had entered the room earlier. He was Enrico Garff.[2]

Sorrento and Naples
Enrico and Diana went to live in Sorrento where their first son, Henrik Daniel and his sister Pamina Victoria, were born. Their second son, Beniamino Michele, was born in Rome in 1988. For seven years the artist supported his family as a language teacher at the university in Naples. However his energy enabled him to paint and exhibit many works in oils in Naples and Sorrento, in Frascati and even in Rome where his sole exhibition in the Saletta Marguttiana was inaugurated by the Swedish Ambassador to Italy.

Garff's exhibitions in Naples were well received by the newspaper Napoli Notte and by the magazine Eco d’arte moderna. Art critic Nino del Prete wrote that Garff's pallette was the chromatically richest one possibly could imagine.[4] In 1971 renowned art critic Paolo Ricci visited Garff's first sole exhibition in Naples and encouraged him by comparing his brush to that of Antonio Ligabue. In 1972 in an article in the summer supplement of the daily paper Il Messaggero, N. Nobiloni wrote that the oil painting, ‘Quercia Falconieri,’ which brought Enrico Garff the second prize of the ‘Concorso Internazionale di Pittura Italia 2000’, depicts a famous oak at the gate of Villa Falconieri in Frascati.[5] The words that Nobiloni uses when describing Garff's paintings such as "intense", "rich" and "violent" are very much the same description that seventeen years later, Federico Fellini's wife Giulietta Masina would write in the painter's guest book at the debut of the Gruppo Zuleika in Rome.[6]

Grottaferrata
Enrico Garff, "Venuto dal Cielo".jpg
In 1978, the painter rented a small house in Grottaferrata for his wife and children. In an article in the Finnish-Swedish magazine for culture, Astra, later Astra Nova, Dean Dixon's widow, Mary Mandelin Dixon pictures the rural life of the artist and his family in the little fairy tale house amongst figs, grapes and pink roses and bordering on a meadow from which there was a lovely view on Tusculum.[7] In this romantic place Garff, assisted by his spouse and mother in law, organized a special exhibition for Scandinavian tourists (June 1977) and he even sung Neapolitan songs to the visitors. With the money that this exhibition added to his income, a month later he financed the families move to Sweden. He left his post at the university, allowing himself the freedom to travel and to paint full-time.

Sweden
Enrico Garff, "Diana in Venice".jpg
This was the beginning of an odyssey that led the artist..

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Awards

1972 ‘Concorso Internazionale di Pittura Italia 2000’,

Group Exhibitions

1970 1959: Via Margutta Collettiva Rome Italy
1989 Zuleika group Via del Corso Rome Italy
1989 Zuleika I coloristi della Nuova intuziome, Capena Rome

Solo Exhibitions

2003 Permanent Exhibition in Kamppi public Sercice Office from year 2003 onwards.
1970 Naples Eco d:Arte Moderna

Contracted Gallery

Art Expo Zurich Switzerland

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