Tano Festa (Roma 1938 – 1988)

Debutant at the La Salita gallery in Rome, in 1960 he exhibited in New York at the exhibition "New Generation in Italy". In 1963 the group that shares Festa’s artistic ideas meets under the name of "People's Square School" and exhibits in the same year at the La Tartaruga gallery. Festa in this period operates by extrapolating elements from their usual context and, mutilating their functions, makes them expressive in their mysterious and impenetrable physicality. In '64 he took part in the Venice Biennale, two years later he was invited to a Dadaist exhibition in Milan where he met Man Ray and Ans Harp, two significant figures for his work. Festa thinks that to define "Italian pop art" we must start from the assumption that in Italy pop can only be, rather than a bottle of Coca Cola, the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo, true brands of Made in Italy.

With Tano Festa and Guastalla’s gallery there was a strong personal and artistic relationship promoted by the friend Francesco Soligo, culminating with the exhibition "Il vascello fantasma", with over one hundred works, for which the artist composed a homonymous poem, set up in 1987 and inaugurated in the presence of Tano. On this occasion he produced an album of five original lithographs for the Graphis Arte editions. In 2019 we again decided to pay homage to him with the exhibition "Viaggi diversi, 1961 - 1987. 40 works by Tano Festa".

A work Omaggio a Modigliani, oil on canvas, is exhibited in the Casa Natale Amedeo Modigliani Livorno.