Thesis title: ETTORE SPALLETTI: TRA GENEALOGIA E CONTESTO (1960-1975)
This research reconstructs the formative phase of Ettore Spalletti’s artistic career (Cappelle Sul Tavo, Pescara 1940 – Spoltore, Pescara 2019), focusing on the period between 1960 and 1975. Starting from a reinterpretation of the established view that identifies the solo exhibition at Galleria La Tartaruga in 1975 as the official beginning of his career, the research redefines the theoretical, stylistic, and contextual foundations of his early poetics. Despite the critical acclaim Spalletti received from the 1980s onward, scholarly attention has largely neglected the earlier stages of his development, thus limiting a full understanding of his oeuvre.
By means of an archival investigation based on often unpublished sources - including catalogues, printed articles, photographs, materials conserved in the Ettore Spalletti Archive and other public and private funds - the thesis reconstructs the artist's trajectory year by year, through the identification of exhibitions, works and documents that have hitherto been overlooked. The methodological approach integrates a chronological mapping of Spalletti’s exhibition history and reception with a close analysis of his artistic language, particularly in relation to the regional and national art scenes.
The findings reveal an artist engaged in a coherent and conceptually autonomous process of research, in which each initial intuition was progressively elaborated and deepened, in dialogue with the most experimental instances of the moment, generating developments that were coherently grafted onto subsequent works. At the same time, far from appearing as mere youthful experiments, the phases prior to 1975 rather display a certain autonomy of thought and originality that, precisely because of these aspects, anticipate in terms of themes and reflections many of the directions that characterise the artist's best-known language.
The thesis consists of three chapters, which follow a chronological structure with a focus on the works: the first explores the formative phase and the first works between 1960 and 1967, the second investigates the objectivist and environmental turning point starting in 1968, the third rereads the aforementioned 1975 exhibition as a moment of formalisation of the research on colour impastos, reconstructing its genesis and context in light of the previous phases.
Lastly, a bio-bibliographical apparatus has been prepared that brings together exhibitions and critical writings relating to the years taken into consideration by this research, in order to integrate the thematic and philological gaze entrusted to the central body of the thesis with a diversified and chronologically punctual perspective. By reassessing the significance of Spalletti’s early work, this research contributes to a more nuanced and historically grounded understanding of his artistic development and positions it within broader art-historical discourses.