Leoncillo Foundation

Born in Spoleto, Italy, in 1915, Leoncillo Leonardi, known as Leoncillo, was one of the most important Italian sculptors of the post-war period, celebrated for transforming clay into a vehicle for the expressive ambitions of modern art. He forged an entirely new and, as art historian and curator Enrico Crispolti described, ‘unprecedented’ kind of sculpture, grounded in the poetics of the body and the gesture, and animated by a visceral, dynamic sense of materiality. His singular oeuvre garnered critical acclaim both within Italy and internationally. Over the course of his career, he represented Italy in six editions of the Venice Biennale between 1948 and 1968.

Never allowing himself to be confined by a single style or movement, Leoncillo’s practice was defined above all by an unwavering devotion to clay and to the inner, felt experience of the human body. His early work was predominantly figurative, reflecting an affinity with the expressive styles of the Baroque and the Scuola Romana, a group with which he was associated during the 1930s. The Second World War, however, precipitated a decisive shift in his practice towards increasingly experimental modes of abstraction. He first engaged with the geometric vocabulary of post-Cubism before ultimately embracing the improvisational and highly gestural ethos of Arte Informale, which emerged as a dominant artistic tendency in Europe during the late 1940s and 1950s. 

After studying in Rome, Leoncillo returned to Umbria in 1939. There, away from Italy’s major cities and their artistic circles, he developed an increasingly profound relationship with the natural world. Deeply engaged with the existential possibilities of matter, he approached clay not merely as a sculptural medium but as a living substance that bore the potential of both destruction and renewal. Animated by fissures, splits and grooves, Leoncillo’s sculptures evoke trees as readily as expanses of cracked earth, flesh, fossils, leaves and stones. Yet his aim was never to imitate the appearances of the natural world. To make art was to express being and, with it, the experiences of anguish, desire, beauty and suffering. His sculptures explore the body beyond its strictly human boundaries. As Alberto Salvadori, Director of Fondazione ICA Milano, observes, in Leoncillo’s work, ‘everything has a body. And the body is a concept, not just a form.’

During this period, he produced a series of innovative polychrome sculptures using coloured clays that he layered and modelled into organic, abstract forms, often working directly with his hands or using wire to make deep incisions into the surface. Colour – no longer simply applied to the sculpture’s exterior through glaze – also emerged from within the material itself, released through successive cuts and ruptures that evoked the wounds of Italy’s regenerating post-war society. ‘Cutting the clay with a wire is to enact a decisive gesture – cruel and liberating,’ Leoncillo stated. ‘The clay is like my own flesh, an absolute process of identification.’ His works conceive of sculpture as a process of continual becoming, rooted in the elemental forces of nature and the vital, transformative properties of clay.

Leoncillo’s gestural cuts invite parallels with his contemporaries, evoking both the patchwork compositions of his Informale peer Alberto Burri, assembled from stitched burlap sacks, and Lucio Fontana’s renowned Tagli (Cuts), the slashed canvases through which he crystallised his Spatialist theories. Though Leoncillo and Fontana shared a fertile intellectual dialogue – a room at the XXVII Venice Biennale in 1954 was dedicated to the two artists – they arrived at the cut from fundamentally distinct positions. While Fontana sought to dematerialise the painted gesture and open up a new, uncharted spatial dimension beyond the picture plane, Leoncillo considered material his primary means of expression and dove ever deeper into its substance in order to reveal its intrinsic life force. As Luca Massimo Barbero, Director of the Institute of Art History of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, writes, Leoncillo’s cuts represented ‘an entirely new form of art and sculpture, where the simplest and humblest of materials – the earth itself – is transformed and transfigured into a matter that gathers around itself the prodigies of space and the liturgy of silence.’ 

Leoncillo rejected the notion that ceramics was an anachronistic medium tied to a distant artisanal past. ‘I have never used it in an “ancient” way; I have never been archaic,’ he said. ‘I have always understood ceramics as a break with the traditional concept of sculpture.’ Embracing clay for its responsiveness to human touch and its capacity for immediate expression, Leoncillo envisaged his engagement with the medium as, in many respects, an affirmation of the present. As he explained: ‘Because with it a new organicity is possible. The organicity of what grows and is alive [...] Because ceramics, precisely, can give more than any other material those visible, almost tactile conditions through which a state of mind is expressed.’

Leoncillo’s first solo exhibition took place at the Galleria del Fiore, Florence (1949). Subsequent solo exhibitions were held at Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome (1957); Galleria Blu, Milan (1960); Galleria L’Attico, Rome (1962); Galleria Odyssia, Rome (1965; travelled to Galleria Odyssia, New York); and Modern Art Agency, Naples (1968). He participated in six editions of the Venice Biennale (1948, 1950, 1952, 1954, 1960 and 1968) as well as the VII Milan Triennale (1940); Antwerp Biennale (1953, 1959) and Rome Quadriennale (1955, 1959). In 1954 and 1964, he was awarded the Faenza Prize, a prestigious competition for contemporary ceramic art.  

In 1950, Leoncillo’s sculpture was included in the major exhibition Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today, which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum, New York before touring to 11 other venues in the USA. His work was also included in group exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1948); Musée Rodin, Paris (1960, 1966); Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek (1961); Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (1964); and Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (1964). In 1962, his work was included in Sculptures in the City – V Festival of Two Worlds, Spoleto, curated by Giovanni Carandente. 

Since his death, Leoncillo’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome (1979); Rocca Albornoziana, Spoleto (1985); Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Palazzo Forti, Verona (1985); Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza (1995); Fonti del Clitunno, Campello sul Clitunno (2015); and Museo Novecento, Florence (2021). He was also included in group shows at institutions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1986); Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1990); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1994); Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (2012); Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza (2014); Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (2015, 2018); Palazzo Fortuny, Venice (2017); and Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2018).