Marco Sassone Studio: Body of Work.
The exhibition runs until May 5, 2024.
Featured are 16 works from various periods of the artist’s career. The inclusion of new pieces created especially for this exhibition will allow visitors to explore the artist’s powerful research into the relationship between images and reality and the connection between his personal life and our collective history.
Marco Sassone has enjoyed international acclaim as a painter for over forty years. He was born in Florence and today lives and works in Toronto. The most poignant and enduring of his influences can be traced back to his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in the 1960s with painter Silvio Loffredo, himself a student of the Austrian master Oscar Kokoschka. His teachers’ agitated brushstrokes and vibrant colours appealed to Sassone, offering the artist a foundation that has remained constant throughout his career.
In a review for Toronto Life in April 2008, David Balzer observed: “As products of Sassone’s hand, even such unsightly things as expressways and parking lots become magical, not only because they are cast in an ethereal, post-impressionistic glow, but also because the artist sees them as dynamic, muscular routes into the heart of a vibrant city.”
The artist’s work is deeply indebted to the history of European painting and portraiture, with a particular emphasis on the status of power, reconnecting with the archetypes of centuries-old conventions of representation. More at ease with his brushes than with theory, Marco Sassone has continued to employ the figurative style he learned in his youth in Florence. In an era of mass reproduction and the digital exploitation of imagery, his subjects express the tension between conventional forms and contemporary relevance, thus inviting interpretation in a classical as well as a modern perspective.
The artist's work has been included in numerous exhibitions, at the National Academy of Design, New York (1977); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (1988); Berheim-Jeune, Paris (1988); Cloisters of Santa Croce, Florence (1997); Pietrasanta Museum, Pietrasanta, Italy (2003); San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, San Angelo, Texas (2014); Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto (2016); Columbus Centre, Toronto (2019). Significant among the numerous books and catalogues that have been published about Sassone’s work is the monograph "Sassone" (1979) by art historian Donelson Hoopes, one-time senior curator of American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Sassone’s autobiography, American Journey: My Life in Art was released in March 2023.
Marco Sassone was knighted into the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic by President Sandro Pertini in 1982.
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The show will feature 16 works from various periods of the artist’s career. The inclusion of new pieces created especially for this exhibition will allow visitors to explore the artist’s powerful research into the relationship between images and reality and the connection between his personal life and our collective history.
Marco Sassone has enjoyed international acclaim as a painter for over forty years. He was born in Florence and today lives and works in Toronto. The most poignant and enduring of his influences can be traced back to his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in the 1960s with painter Silvio Loffredo, himself a student of the Austrian master Oscar Kokoschka. His teachers’ agitated brushstrokes and vibrant colours appealed to Sassone, offering the artist a foundation that has remained constant throughout his career.
