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In remembrance of Oliviero Leonardi, on the occasion of the XV Florence Biennale, the “Lorenzo il Magnifico” Lifetime Achievement Award from the President in memoriam will be awarded to his homonymous association, which continues to foster research on his study and promote his artwork.

Oliviero Leonardi (1921 - 2019) was born in 1921 in Vezzano, a municipality of Trento, Italy. He worked as a painter, sculptor, enamellist, ceramist based in Rome and later in Paris. As the descendant of a large and ancient family of Trentino master ceramists and glassmakers, Oliviero inherited from a young age the skills and know-how that his family handed down for generations, and spent most of his youth at his father’s kiln.

He was a parachutist during World War II. After the war, he spent six year on Capri, where he devoted himself to philosophical and artistic studies and marked the beginning of his research. There, he learned about oriental philosophy, esoteric symbols and ancient languages, experimented with different materials such as clay, ceramics, stone, metals, wood, plastic, canvas, and the possibilities of steel at high temperature, of which he was one of the early pioneers.  His oeuvre contains paintings on steel, paintings on canvas, sculptures, bas-reliefs, ceramics, and drawings. Surrounding the subject of cosmology, his work captures the scene of the world. His art tells a universal story, the origin of the universe, a primordial event recreated by colours and letters fired at high temperature. He was widely recognised in the 1970s and 1980s for his paintings with experimental materials on steel plates fired at 900 degrees Celsius. His artistic research focused, among others, on the theme of cosmogony, and was partially influenced by futurism, surrealism, cubism and informalism.
 

In 1972, he founded the Romacrea Art School with Jeanine de Lorière, a Parisian stylist and artist, which over twenty-five years welcomed students from various socio-economic backgrounds to experiment diverse materials in painting and sculpture.  His works were studied by important art historians and critics, including Giulio Carlo Argan and Elio Mercuri, and many international experts on Modern or Early Modern art, such as Gustav René Hocke.
 

Throughout his career, he participated in more than 25 collective and solo exhibitions in major art galleries in Italy, France, Spain, Monaco, Germany and Luxembourg, and had exhibited together with artists such as Giorgio De Chirico, Salvador Dalí and John Miró. His works were also exhibited at the Maschio Angioino, the Centro di Cultura Italiana, the Saarland Museum, the Van Gogh House and the Limoges Biennale, and commissioned for public spaces including at the Piazza Bologna Rome metro station.