Born in Palermo in 1927,
Bruno Caruso starts to draw in his childhood after the example of the old
masters. Socially and culturally engaged artist,writer and essayist, he started
to show his works in Italy and abroad immediately after the Second World War.
In his first one-man show in Palermo he exhibited a collection of drawings
inspired by the ruins of the war: social and civil engagement is a constant
element of his art production.Caruso’s drawings executed in the Fifties in the
asylum in Palermo documented and charged the condition of the inmates in the
mental hospitals and contributed to the psychiatric reform carried out by
Italian authorities. In 1947 he started to regularly travel to Praga, London and
Paris and later on to Asia and the Far East, where he took a great interest in
calligraphy and miniature. He was a great activist in the fight for the cultural emancipation of
Sicily, his native country, which is a constant source of inspiration for his
work. Gifted by an impressive ability and natural skill, he is an extraordinary
artist who draws and paints as the old masters used to do. He is also a great
engraver and graphic artist, a subtle humorist and writer, one of the most
renown representatives of the figurative tradition and essay writing of the
post-war period in Italy. His bibliography is endless, as of 1954, and his
curriculum vitae includes a numberless
list of one-man shows in museums and galleries all over the world. He was
awarded in 1988 the Honorary Degree from the Palermo Universiy and in 1994 he
was appointed Academician of San Luca.
In 2002 he received from the President of
the Republic the Gold Medal as well-deserving leading personality of the Italian
Culture. In 2004 the Assembly of the Sicilian Region and the Federico
IIFoundation sponsored a great retrospective of his drawings from 1944 to 2004,
and the President of the Assembly introduced him in the catalogue as “a leading
character of the Sicilian Twentieth Century, a cultured and sensitive
intellectual who, between Palermo and Rome, was able to document a Sicily
finally free from the usual stereotypes of landscape and folklore, and gave by
his work a proof to be an artist gifted with a great virtuosity in dealing with
the different art media and a deep knowledge of authentic ethnic contents”.
