Gillo
DORFLES

Gillo Dorfles was born in Trieste in 1910. After the outbreak of the First World War, his family moves to Genoa, where the artist spends his childhood. When the war ends, he returns to Trieste where he studies at the Classical Lyceum. He moves to Milan in 1928 to study medicine, but after three years he decides to complete his university studies in Rome under Cesare Frugoni; he graduates in 1934, specializing in neuropsychiatry.
In the 1930s he is active as an art critic and essayist, contributing to La Rassegna d’Italia, Le Arti Plastiche, La Fiera Letteraria, Il Mondo, Domus, Aut Aut, The Studio, The Journal of Aesthetics.
He starts painting in the 1930s. In 1948, together with Bruno Munari, Atanasio Soldati, and Gianni Monnet, he founds the Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC), whose aim is to breathe life into a new artistic language, capable of assimilating and superseding the European abstract research in the previous decades. The 1950s mark the beginning of Dorfles’ theoretical and critical activity, which is unquestionably innovative and disruptive with respect to the still-dominant assumptions based on Croce’s ideas. Dorfles is especially interested in the phenomena of mass communication, fashion, design, as well as painting, sculpture, and modern and contemporary architecture. Since the 1960s he has taught aesthetics in several Italian universities (Milan, Trieste, Cagliari), and since the 1980s he has gone back to painting and graphic art, which he had been forced to interrupt owing to his work.