2014
Welcome to the World of Carlo Donati
Carlo Donati was born in Rome, where he still lives and works in his atelier-studio at Via Pignatelli 25.
Donati studied in Rome, where he attended the Accademia delle Belle Arti with Professor Guzzi and the Arts and Letters Faculty, majoring in History of Art: he then graduated with a degree in Architecture. His thesis discussed Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of decoration and architecture.
In the beginning of his activity as painter and sculptor, he taught in various high schools in the capitol, becoming assistant to Professor Filiberto Menna in instruction of Art History on the Faculty of Architecture at La Sapienza University in Rome.
Nevertheless his vocation as an artist soon prevailed over his university career, so he could dedicate himself to the project of the unification of the various phases of artistic expression - painting, sculpture, architecture and theater.
It was there in the theater that he began intense historical and linguistic research. Embarking from Aristophanes, Euripides, Menandro and Plauto, and traveling through the avant-garde theater of Ionesco, Beckett, Picabia, Tzara, Piscator, Calvino, Pasolini and other authors, Donati adapted them, putting them into various theatrical performances.
As for Architecture, Donati has never abandoned the endeavor to find "transcendence" from the superficial and reductive logic of the housing cell (rationalism of Grophius). He has positioned it in the field of a pure autonomous language that can also reap benefits of the grand and extraordinary culture and research of this renaissance, in structural as well as aesthetic terms.
Donati reproposes the virtue of these cultural certitudes in all his projects (both realized or only projected) - - in the many churches, plazas, housing, monuments and theater sets he has been commissioned to design. They are always constrained and brought back towards a synthetic unification. It is definitely his research and the experience in theater that confirms his beliefs. As in the theater, through corporality, speech, expression and dynamism, the geometry of architectural perspective, plasticity of sculpture and the colors of painting take body and live together.
The works of Carlo Donati have been exhibited all over Italy as well as in museums and galleries in France, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, Canada and the Soviet Union.
