Collection: Fausto Melotti   1901 - 1986 

Fausto Melotti was born in Rovereto (Trento) on the 8th of June 1901. In 1918 he enrolled in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Pisa, a course of studies that he continued at the Politecnico in Milan, where he graduated in Electrotechnical Engineering in 1924. During this period he studied the piano and took up studies of sculpture in Turin under the sculptor Pietro Canonica. In 1928 he enrolled at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, where he was the pupil of Adolfo Wildt with Lucio Fontana, with whom he formed a long friendship. In 1932 he agreed to give a course in modern plastic arts at the Scuola artigianale in Cantù.

In 1935 Fausto Melotti’s cousin Carlo Belli published Kn, a text described by Kandinsky as being “the Gospel of abstract art”. It was the theoretical development of the experimentation undertaken by the abstract artists who, along with Belli and Melotti, met in the Bar Craya in Milan. That same year Melotti joined Abstraction-Création, the movement founded in Paris in 1931 by Van Doesburg, Seuphor, Vantogerloo with the aim of championing the work of non-figurative artists.