Bernardo Balestrieri - Sculpture depicting the head of a young man

Submitted by Massimo Sarandrea on the 5th of October 2014

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Bernardo Balestrieri (Palermo, 1888 - 1965)
“Sculpture depicting the head of a young man”
Bronze
Second decade of the twentieth century
Dimensions: h. 36 cm x l. 49 cm including the marble base in yellow of Siena
Signed on base: Balestrieri B. Roma

 

Bernardo Balestrieri studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo where he attended the lectures of Francis Lojacono and Ettore De Maria Bergler, while Vincenzo Ragusa is his teacher of sculpture.
In 1904 he moved to Rome to take part in a national competition for the Pensionato Artistico Nazionale of sculpture, won the second prize with the group Il lavoro (the work) and always in Rome, he graduated from the school of the art of the coin, at the mint of the Kingdom.
He get in touch with other famous Sicilian teachers Mario Rutelli and Ettore Ximenes, active in the capitol for several years and in 1921 he exhibited again in Rome Il giocatore di palla (the ball player).
Back then in Palermo in the late twenties, where he worked as a decorator, creating architectural friezes and mainly as a portraitist for the bourgeoisie; in 1928 and the following year he takes part in exhibitions of the Sicilian Fascist Syndicate of Fine Arts.
Became a professor at the art school in Palermo, thins over the years to show his work, while maintaining a strong sculpture in the late nineteenth century, with his favourite topics from everyday life; figures due to the common ways of Southern realism never abandoned, he manage to make the intrinsic poetry, feelings of everyday living, still clearly evident also in the Testina (head) in bronze exhibited in 1955 at the Exhibition of Figurative Arts of the Sicilian Regional Syndicate of Fine Arts at the Art Club of Palermo.

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