Mimmo Germanà was born in Catania in 1944. He began his self-taught career by letting himself be influenced by the post-conceptual climate. His first painting prize received him when, during the military period, he participated in an extemporaneous painting competition. This first recognition confirms this in his vocation even though he has not yet found a way to express his art in a personal way. After his classical studies in Sicily, his homeland, he abandoned her to perfect her artistic knowledge and went to Rome, where he attended the art institute and the Academy. In 1968 he met Alessandro Chia and Francesco Clemente, with whom he began his first experiments for a new art form. Clemente, who was a student of Architecture at the time, used photography for his composition while Chia, who was converting to figurative painting, projected the shadow of a rose on the white canvas. In the 1970s Mimmo Germanà attentive observer and admirer of the German Expressionists (Kirchner above all), of the French Fauves, but also of Munch, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, DeKooning and Chagall, absorbs, elaborates and instinctively creates a completely personal pictorial form. The primitivism of Gauguin’s painting blends with the intense colors of his land Sicily, in compositions that mixing the dream with the mythological give rise to a form of ‘Mediterranean Expressionism, completely personal.
In these youthful years, then, which we might call ‘experimental’, it investigates the minimal abstract, the figure and the composition of several canvases. Putting all these experiences to fruition, in the 1980s began a new pictorial path that Francesco Gallo described as ‘a dazzling, fast coloured fantasy, of yellow, red, blue, a sort, as we said above, of Mediterranean Expressionism, which combined the primitiveism of forms with the dionysian charge of intense colors and strong materials, to compose scenes of mythical scents.
This fantastic energy (Sebastian Grasso called it "the Italian Chagall") earned him, as early as 1980 the participation at the Venice Biennale, invited by the famous art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, who collected a small group of young Italian artists under the denomination of Transavant-garde.
The Transavant-garde were initially part of: Chia, Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino and De Maria and after the first nucleus were added Mimmo Germanà, Ernesto Tatafiore and Ernesto Longobardi (all present in the Open 80 section of the Biennale, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and Harald Szeemann).
With the Transavant-garde it was intended to return to the ‘hot’ joy, colour, manuality and figure after the ‘colds, ’ 1970s of conceptual art. The artist tends to enhance his popular roots and ancestral tradition. Germanà manages to represent in his works the color and smells of the Mediterranean.
According to St. Grasso, ‘Germanà is the James Dean of art because he has always opted for a strong painting, while for Old ’ is a Centaur of brushstroke, of an adventurous sign and of Him Achille Bonito Oliva writes ‘’ a flowing rhythm holds his painting, made of thick and brushstrokes, of dark colors and strong materials.
Its activity, already very intense in the 1970s, years in which it had led to
taking part in exhibitions in numerous Italian private galleries, in the 1980s he also took him abroad, where
was much appreciated.
His Works are preserved in numerous European and American museums. In 1987 he was awarded the Award Gallarate (‘’ .. to this artist with a complex personality, nonconformist and
tenacious, whose fundamental themes are figures of women with characteristic oval faces and enchanting landscapes
Mediterranean, which is part of its iconographic vocabulary.
The Chagall of our home, who died sick with AIDS, was only 48 years old in April 1992.
