ENRICO CAMPAGNOLA

Enrico Campagnola (1911-1984), a Venetian by birth, began sculpting and drawing with talent in his early childhood. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome in 1934 - sculpture section - and taught in Besançon. Then he moved to Paris in 1947 and worked in advertising. Without a studio, he devoted all his free time to painting and modeling.

In 1955 the "Grand Prix International de peinture de Deauville" awarded him a special mention for "Nu aux coquillages". This distinction is the starting point of his career as a painter and of a unanimous success with collectors and art critics in France and abroad, mainly in the United States.
An exhibition was organized by the Seventy Five Gallery in New York. From 1957, the Madsen Gallery exhibited his work permanently on rue Saint-Honoré. He was invited to the Rome Quadrennial, the Venice Biennale, participated in the Salon d'Automne, and was selected for the Greenshields Prize at the Galerie Charpentier. Foreign museums acquired his paintings.

From 1968 onwards, he completely lost interest in the commercial and media aspects of his career to devote himself to more personal work in both painting and sculpture.

The prodigious faculty of his creative gifts is revealed by his works which illustrate through the permanence of the woman, his inexhaustible love of beauty.

In 1985 the association "Espaces Enrico Campagnola", newly created to rediscover the artist's work, donated paintings and sculptures to the City of Deauville, which have since been exhibited at the Villa Strassburger, and opened a reference site on his work: www.museecampagnola.fr

Since 1985, in accordance with Campagnola's wishes, other donations have been made and can be seen at the Musée des Années 30 in Boulogne-Billancourt (Hauts de Seine), at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Meudon (Hauts de Seine) and at the Musée La Piscine in Roubaix (Nord).

Exhibitions have been organized:
- 1987 in Saint-Martin-de-Brômes (Alpes de haute Provence)
- 1988 in Aubusson (Creuse) and in the Musée du Chapeau in Chazelles-sur-Lyon (Loire)
- 1989 at the Espace Richelieu des AGF in Paris, - 1990 at the Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senans (Doubs)
- 1992 in Possagno (Veneto)
- 1994 at the BNP Opera in Paris
- 1998 at the Chapelle Saint-Elme in Villefranche-sur-mer (Alpes maritimes).
In 2008 a retrospective was organized in the village hall by the municipality of Deauville.
In 2015, the catalog raisonné of 2300 works on DVD was included in the book "Enrico Campagnola, sculpteur et peintre" (Éditions Somogy) which can be consulted in part on www.google.fr