Donato Linzalata
/ Italy

Donato Linzalata was born in 1942 in Genzano di Lucania,
where he lives and works. He has been a student of Emilio
Greco at the Academy of Fine arts in Naples. In 1972 he held
his first personal exhibition in the Sassi of Matera, followed by
important exhibitions in Switzerland, France, Brazil, Canada
and Turkey. In 1999 he held his first anthological exhibition,
with a monographic catalogue, at the Circolo culturale Bertolt
Brecht in Milan. He has carried out an intense graphic and
chalcographic activity, and was one of the founding members
of the free school of graphics of the La Scaletta association in
Matera, but he is mainly recognised as a master sculptor.
For decades his research has focused on the theme of the
totem: primordial and mysterious figures stretched out in an
obscure verticality are carved from local woods and draw on
a metahistorical imagery that could be as close to Lucanian
peasant ethnography as to the pre-Columbian cults of Central
America or to a pre-classical Mediterranean tradition.