Guido Marzulli (1943-)

A contemporary figurative realism representative (not ideological realism), he was born in Bari, Italy, on July 8th, 1943 to a wealthy family.

Particularly skilled in life drawing, since his childhood he became familiar with brushes and colors, under the influence of his mother Ms. Rosa Tosches (painter and drawing teacher) and his father Michele (painter and poet).

He begun his artistic life in Bari and attended various meetings and debates with important scholars and southern Italian painters, who used to be part of the literary and artistic salon established in his parent home during the sixties.

In Bari he completed a degree in Economics.

In 1970 he moved his residence to Rome. During the same period he traveled around Europe, broadening  his knowledge about the greatest artists of antiquity, such as Rembrandt, Goya and Titian, and  European masters from  the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.  Back in Rome,  he would continue his research on both landscape and portrait painting.

In 1990 at the Biennial in Rome G. Tortelli he was awarded the Gold Medal

He has also been a Chief Executive, a superb public speaker, and a refined art collector.

He is residing in Milan since 1991.

The painstaking quality of the refinement in his paintings mean production is not high, so paintings are found only rarely on the market as a result.

He originally set his work along the path traced by the naturalist Neapolitan tradition, he revisits it through the neo-impressionist experience, interpreting it with strength and a twentieth century mark.  Contrary to the informal and the abstract waves, far away from torment and anguish, Marzulli starts from the belief that the pictorial story doesn’t need intermediaries to explain the meanings, but it must be easy to interpret by common people, who should be able to recognize themselves into it, feel direct emotions and without any difficulties finding out resemblances of own private memories. 

He, on the other hand doesn’t scatter himself behind symbolism or hidden meanings, and keeps a fine balance between contemporary and an everyday sense of elapsed time, getting inspired by memories and by social reality, interpreting those, sometimes with an indirect nostalgic mind, with a straight and equable language, chromatic evocative personal sense  and often adapting the mere visual aspect to his own feeling and, to his own ideal of composite armory.

His characteristic main themes, introduced likely with narrative mood and well balanced idealism and realism at the same time, are inspired to life scenes and intimate domestic interiors with figures, rural and characteristic views, open markets, seascapes, urban views and street sights, all framed by a background of events, folk and upper class characters.

His portraits, full of evocative power, catch the intimacy of the character.

His works are in the Public Italian Museums permanent collections. They are quoted in the Bari Museum (Provincial Picture Gallery) and Latina (Municipal Modern Art Gallery).

Information provided by teacher Mary Cafagno (collector, scholar and expert in Italian art).

Sources include :
1) (first and foremost) =Documentation in Bio-iconographic Archive of the Supervisory Office of the Contemporary and Modern Art National Gallery in Rome (Ministry of cultural assets) - Archivio bioiconografico della Soprintendenza alla Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna di Roma ( Ministero dei Beni culturali);

2) Archivio Comanducci;

3) Dizionario enciclopedico internazionale d'arte moderna e contemporanea, ed. Ferrara, Alba, 2003, p. 503.

4) Catalogo dell'Arte Moderna - Gli Artisti Italiani dal Primo Novecento ad Oggi - . Ed. Milano, Giorgio MONDADORI, 2009. N.45, sez.II "p" 280, sez.III "p" 100. (ISBN 978-88-6052-245-0).

5) Wikipedia