Aligi Sassu was born in Milan, on July 17, 1912. He moved with his family to Thies, in Sardinia, in 1921 and lived there until 1924. Back in Milan, he was fascinated by the futuristic journals and texts he read and in 1919, he visited the futurists’ first collection in Cova.

In 1925, he left school to work as a lithographic apprentice in a workshop, concluding his studies at night school.

He got to know Marinetti who invited him to submit two of his works for the Venice Biennale, in 1928. They were “Nude model” and “The man who drank from the source.” In the same year, he signed the poster painting “Dynamism and muscle reform” with Munari.

In 1929, he enrolled at the Brera Academy and met Lucio Fontana, with whom he would work with many years later in Albissola. He had to leave the Brera Academy for economic reasons, and it was so, that he attended the Free Academy established by the Director of the Milan Gallery, called Barbaroux. In 1929, his work was present in two collective exhibitions in Milan. It was also the period in which the “Cyclists” and “The Red Men” were created. In 1932, he exhibited at the Galleria del Milione and the first text on the work of Sassu was published by Sandro Bibi.

He left for Paris in the autumn of 1934, where he visited an exhibition of Matisse and studied the works of great artists such as Gericault, Cezanne, Delacroix at the museums. It was during his stay, that his political commitment, working actively against fascism, began to grow.

When Mussolini’s troops were defeated in the Battle of Giadalajara, he prepared a poster praising the insurrection with his friend, De Grada. After this, on 6th April, 1937, the OVRA police raided his home and studio. He was arrested on charges of subversion as the police had found the manifesto draft and paper used to print it. He was transferred to the San Vittore prison, and moved, six months later, to Regina Coeli in Rome. He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. During this period, he abandoned his studies and painting, but picked them up again when he was transferred to Fossano and given the opportunity to write and draw- producing more than than four hundred drawings.

On 27th July, 1938, he was granted a royal pardon, but remained under special surveillance.

He continued to paint works of op position, such as “Spain 1937″ and “The Death of Caesar”. In 1941, he held a solo exhibition in the “Current” workshop, displaying his painting “Red Men”, for the first time. In 1947, he moved to Castel Cabiaglio, in the province of Varese, where he worked hard, experimenting new painting techniques, and painted the work “Coffee” as well as sacred pictures.

He then moved to Albissola and Mazzotti and invited him to work for him. He met Picasso in 1954. In 1964, he moved to Mallorca in Cala San Vicente, Spain, and it was iin this period that he began to paint Tauromachie- the island’s landscapes- that are paintings with mythological themes and experimental with his new acrylic technique.

In 1967, he returned back to Italy in Ponticello Brianza. In 1973, he dedicated his work creating sets and costumes of Sicilian Vespers for the reopening of the Teatro Regio, in Turin. In 1977, he made two mosaics in honour of St. Andrew in Pescara as well as exhibiting his work in Rotterdam,  Toronto and Mallorca.

In 1981, he moved to Milan and was awarded the prize for “The men who made Milan great” and presented his fifty-eight watercolours.

In 1984, he put one hundred and eleven works on display at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, in a retrospective exhibition. The exhibition then moved to Rome where it was held in Castel Sant’Angelo. In the same year, he presented an exhibition of two hundred and seventy-four still works at the Royal Palace in Milan as well as exhibiting in Seville, Germany, Madrid and Canada.

Two years later, he held other exhibitions in Palma di Mallorca, at the XI Quadrennial in Rome, the Milan Triennale and at the Casa di Mantegna in Mantova. At the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, one hundred and thirteen paintings of his on the Divine Comedy were put on display. From 1927 to 1985 a great anthology of his works was set up on display in Monaco di Bavaria. In 1992, eighty of his paintings went to make up a traveling exhibition in South America. In 1993, he completed a ceramic mural measuring 150 square metres and entitled “The Myths of the Mediterranean” for the European Parliament’s new Headquarters. In 1994, he presented “Manuscriptum”.

In 1995, he was appointed Knight of the Grand Cross by the President of the Republic and in 1996, he donated three hundred and sixty-two of his works to the city of Lugano. It was in the same year that the “Sassu and Selenia Olivares Foundation” was inaugurated and exhibitions organised: in 1999, an exhibition on Futurism and in 2000, another on primitive art.

On 17th July, 1999, he inaugurated a major retrospective at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

He died precisely one year later on July 17, 2000 in Can Marimon a Pollanca.

View the catalogue of Aligi Sassu edited by Giorgio Mondadori