Ugo Attardi

He moved to Palermo with his family, intrigued by painting and its techniques, since he was a child (in his spare time he helped his paternal uncle, an old portrait and landscape painter) he began to attend the Academy of Fine Arts and later the Faculty of Architecture. In 1945 he moved to Rome, hosted by Pietro Consagra, in turn a guest of Renato Guttuso.

The post-war climate full of cultural and civil initiatives allowed him to resume his research with impetus. With some young artists, in 1948, he constituted the Forma Uno movement, with an abstract orientation, however developing divergent visions with respect to the rest of the group. His companions were Carla Accardi, Antonio Sanfilippo, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Concetto Maugeri, Achille Perilli and Giulio Turcato.

In 1948 he took part in the national exhibition of figurative arts (V Quadriennale Nazionale d'Arte) in Rome.

In the early fifties he oriented his art towards expressionism, drawing inspiration from Francis Bacon and George Grosz among others, combining his activity as an artist with his political commitment within the Italian Communist Party. The need to experience a new and visionary relationship with reality leads him to move away from abstractionism, to study his own form of expressionism. In 1952 and 1954 he was invited to the XXVI and XXVII Venice Biennale. In 1956, even in the midst of the crisis of realism, he exhibited successfully in a gallery in Trastevere. In 1958 he participated in the foundation and began collaborating with the cultural and political newspaper "Città Aperta", together with Tommaso Chiaretti, Elio Petri, Renzo Vespignani, Mario Socrate. In the early sixties he took part in numerous exhibitions both in Italy and abroad. In 1961 he founded the group Il Pro e il Contro, leading all the events until the last year, that of the dissolution.