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The 2015 ‘Lorenzo il Magnifico’ Lifetime Achievement Award for the Visual Arts goes to Giampaolo Talani for having modernised mural painting and monumental sculpture by manifesting his vocation for ideal dialogue with the polis collectivity.

Born in San Vincenzo (Livorno) in 1955, Giampaolo Talani trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where he was taught by Goffredo Trovarelli.

In his youth, he produced the cycle of fresco paintings in the church of his home town, followed by other works such as the Sermon of Saint Bernardino in the Bishop's Palace in Massa Marittima and the Sanctuary frescoes of the Madonna del Frassine. Later, he also established himself as a sculptor, especially of bronze works, which could be defined as three-dimensional variants of his pictorial figurations. He exhibited in Italy and abroad, and participated in the 54th Venice Biennale, among others.

At the beginning of the 2000s, he realised the paintings on wood for the staircase of San Vincenzo's Town Hall, presented by Vittorio Sgarbi in 2002, while a monumental sculpture, Il Marinaio (2010), was placed in the town's marina. Of that same seven-metre high work, a 20-metre high version was made in 2012 as a monument to the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci for the port of Miami. In 2006, Talani realised the fresco Partenze (Departures), currently in the Santa Maria Novella railway station but soon to be permanently located in the Museo del Novecento in Florence. The cartoon of this fresco is instead in the Florentine headquarters of the Banca di Cambiano.

In 2008, the Medici city hosted an anthological exhibition of Talani's works in Palazzo Vecchio, entitled the ‘Rose of the Winds’, which his bronze sculpture was placed under the loggia of the Uffizi. Another ‘Rosa dei venti’ has been at the Santa Lucia railway station in Venice since 2014.

The ‘Rosa dei venti - l'isola che non c'è’ is instead the title of the television programme produced by RAI of which Giampaolo Talani was the creator and protagonist in 2008, as well as of his exhibition of sculptural works set up in Pietrasanta, in the evocative Piazzetta del Duomo, in 2009. In the same year, the artist took part in the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with the installation Die Mauer - The Umbrellas of Freedom. In 2015, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of that event, Berlin welcomed Talani's ‘traveller’ - his 3.5-metre sculpture entitled Partenze - to Washingtonplatz, in front of the German capital's main railway station.

Giampaolo Talani's other works in public spaces include Mille Uomini (2008) at the Museo del Risorgimento at the ‘Vittoriano’ in Rome, and Ombra dell'eroe (2007), inspired by the ‘hero of two worlds’, also in Rome, Pinacoteca del Quirinale. Also on display in the residence of the President of the Italian Republic is one of the two bronze castings depicting the Bust of Giuseppe Garibaldi that Talani made on commission for the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy (the other is in Palazzo Madama, seat of the Senate of the Republic).

www.talani.it