MANLIO RHO

MANLIO RHO - Biography

Italian painter (Como 1901 - ivi 1957). In Como, in parallel with his activity as an industrial graphic designer, he devoted himself as a self-taught painter, establishing himself among the protagonists of the Lombard avant-garde. Attentive to contemporary European experiences and the new rationalist instances, from the early 1930s he turned to abstract solutions of a geometric-constructivist matrix, which he continued to elaborate with consistency in the following years (Composizione, 1933, priv. coll.; Composizione 55-10, 1955, Turin, Galleria d'arte moderna; etc.). Among the promoters, in 1938, of the group "Primordial Values," in 1940 he signed the Manifesto of the Primordial Futurist Group Sant'Elia. From 1942 he taught drawing and ornamentation at the National Silk Institute in Como.