Biography

Painter and graphic designer, Erio Baracchi was born in Modena on 6 March 1926, where he studied art, lived and worked. His very first activity saw him dedicate himself to the application of techniques and imprints aimed at the optimum formal rendering, a research that became a peculiar characteristic of his entire production. His artistic career is in fact marked by his experience as a graphic designer in the avant-garde industry to which he associates, from 1961 to 1980, the teaching of artistic disciplines and art history in state schools.
Poet of the future and innovator in content, he starts from the already established technological era to endorse and synthesize symbols that go beyond the contingent, drawing on the characteristics of a planetarity, the only possible cultural model in the future of man.
Erio Baracchi’s debut in the artistic world was marked by his presence in 1953 at the IV National Exhibition of Modern Drawing and Engraving in Reggio Emilia, and since that first appearance there have been over 300 personal and collective exhibitions.
Since 1960 he has been exhibiting almost annually in Milan, the centre of his artistic and cultural training. He participates by invitation to national and international exhibitions such as: Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Painting, Modern Art Centre, Zurich, 1965; Aspects of Modena’s artistic evolution in the 20th century, Timisoara in Romania, 1975; Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport and School of Architecture of the University of Liverpool, 1980. The solo exhibition held at the Woodstock Gallery in London dates back to 1979.
On 2 June 1980 the then President of the Republic Sandro Pertini conferred him the honour of Cavaliere Ordine al merito della Repubblica italiana. In 1983/84 he participated in the Itinerant Exhibition of Modenese Artists in Germany, while in 1995/96 he exhibited in the Sala Gaudì in Barcelona, Spain.
As for the Italian participations, we list: Contemporary art at the Museo Civico, Bologna 1974, Mostra Mercato Segnalati Bolaffi, Turin 1976, Palazzo Lascaris (“), Pittura Emiliana nel XX secolo, Galleria Il Carpine, Rome 1984, Museo d’Arte Moderna dell’alto mantovano di Gazoldo degli Ippoliti, 1993. In 1991, 1992 and 1994 he participated in the Suzzara Prize and the Sulmona Prize in 2003.
Among the numerous awards, it is worth mentioning “Bolaffi” in 1976 and 1983, as well as in the catalogue Italy in Japan I due Rinascimenti, Tokyo 2002. In 1983 the economic magazine Capital counted him among the major emerging artists, indicating his work as a valid investment. After leaving academic teaching in 1980, he became professor at the University of the Third Age of Modena where for twenty years he dedicated himself to his ‘new students’ teaching them the figurative arts and art history with his usual, unchanged passion, rigour and seriousness.
The advent of the new millennium brings new life to Baracchi who, spiritually and artistically renewed, reintroduces his beloved ‘figures’ into his environments, sometimes asymmetrical, and in his ‘expectations’, sometimes lunar. Always and rigorously looking to the horizon, to infinity and to the future.
In the meantime, between 2004 and 2009, he continues to exhibit his works in important traveling exhibitions throughout central and northern Italy.
Although sick, he paints and teaches until the last months, with unchanged enthusiasm and determination, always as if he were a boy full of wonder, in love with painting and man. Mourned by all the friends and students who accompanied him, he left the human and artistic scenarios on October 2, 2012 after leaving behind an indelible sign of his passage in the Italian pictorial and cultural landscape thanks to his poetics and his unique language.