Franz Borghese

Franz Borghese is an Italian painter and sculptor born in Rome in 1941. Through a style that blends sarcasm and irony and uses a language that is elevated to a universal metaphor, he depicts the bourgeoisie of the early 20th century. He approached art as a teenager, when he decided to attend the art school in Via Rapetta where he discovered his love for painting.  Here he was trained by professionals such as Domenico Purificato, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Umberto Maganzini and Giulio Turcato. In 1961 he opened a studio with Sebastiano Sanguigni and in 1964 he founded the group and the homonym magazine Il ferro di cavallo, which he worked on together with artists and intellectuals of the time. It was with some of them that he made the experimental painting-film La grande mela. Through this neo-expressionist film, Borghese recounts the society of his time, victim of a consumerism and alienation that only apparently have no alternatives. The film was screened at the XI Festival dei due Mondi in Spoleto.  In 1968 he opened a gallery where he organised his first solo exhibition. His style blends satire and sarcasm and he looks to artists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, James Ensor, Mino Maccari and Heinrich Hoerle, from whom he draws the crude representation of violence and the tragic and biting representation of society. His artistic tendency evolved influenced by the study of Bosch, Brueghel, Jacques Callot and Piero della Francesca. He was also influenced by his contemporaries Longanesi and Maccari. In 1990, and for 15 years until his death, he began working with the Artesanterasmo gallery in Milan, with which he participated in a group exhibition of Italian painters in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2005.His career flourished with paintings, writings, drawings and exhibitions. Franz Borghese died suddenly in his studio in 2005.