THE ARTIST

Ferdinando Ambrosino was born in Bacoli, near Naples, in 1938 and began painting in his youth, with promising results. After completing secondary school with a specialization in classical studies in 1957, he enrolled at the University of Naples for a degree course in geology, an interest that remained with him for several years.

At the same time, he stepped up his painting and, from 1959, began a series of large-scale works, one of which was awarded a prize at the National Exhibition of Young Italian Painters in Naples.

In 1967 he held his first one-man exhibition at the Maschio Angioino in Naples, and the following year he exhibited his work at an important gallery in Caracas. It was a great success both with the public and the critics and drew the attention of the press.

In the early seventies, he presented his works at the Newman Gallery in Philadelphia, and took part in a travelling exhibition (in Greece, Turkey, Romania and the Soviet Union). In the eighties, he was still a leading player on the international art scene: Venezuela acclaimed his art, assigning him the “Condecoración de la Orden Andrés Bello” for artistic merit; in Italy he exhibited in various cities, with a series of one-man shows, until the major exhibition in the monumental complex of San Michele a Ripa, in Rome (1990).

Nominated a member of the academic senate of the International Academy of Modern Art, in Rome, he exhibited his work in Florida, Crete, New York, Geneva, Marbella, Ferrara, Milan, Paris and San Francisco, in Belgium and Denmark. In Italy he has also taken part in the collective exhibtions: The Portrait. The Artistic and Cultural Roots of Europe (2005), Women (2006), The Beautiful, Art, Writing. Europe, Russia, China, Japan (2007), The Incarnation of Colour and the Writing of Light (2007) at the Villa San Carlo Borromeo Museum, and at the major collective exhibition Treasures of Italy, at the Planning Exhibition Gallery of Chongqing in China (2007).

Spirali has published the following volumes dedicated to the artist: Catalogo delle opere (Catalogue of Works), 1990, Catalogue des œuvres, 1992; L’angelo della notte (Angel of the Night), 1992, L’icona mediterranea (The Mediterranean Icon),2003, and Andrej Rublëv, Ferdinando Ambrosino, 2006, in which the Chinese intellectuals Shen Dali and Don Chun compare the iconographic work of the great Russian painter with Ferdinando Ambrosino's Mediterranean icon.