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A great Italian artist devoted to research and promoting culture
ANYONE WHO IS INVOLVED IN ART CRITICISM AND who studies ceramics would be honoured to deal with the work of this great Italian master, certainly the most internationally renowned Italian artist of the second half of the 20th century. Nino Caruso owes his fame, first of all, to the ongoing artistic research work he has done in the field of ceramic sculpture and its application in architecture and urban design works. He has devoted himself to this activity for more than 50 years now, mainly in Rome, where he founded the Centro Internazionale di Ceramica (International Centre for Ceramics) in Piazza S Salvatore in Lauro (1965-1985). The centre was housed in a building overlooking the beautiful loggia of a Renaissance monastery and was attended by dozens of artists from all over the world. Among these, mention must be made of the young Japanese artist Tomokazu Hirai who, after two years in Rome, moved to Faenza and attended the Ballardini State Art Institute (there he met Carlo Zauli) and the famous Japanese ceramist Hideto Satonaka. The Centro Internazionale di Ceramica was attended by other artists such as Winifred Lutz, Howard Shapiro and Tom Kerrigan from the US and Ulrike Bogel from Germany.
Caruso's biography also includes details about the many universities where he held courses in the US. The great respect in which he is held is also due to the many books he has written that have been published by the Italian publishing house Hoepli based in Milan. The first book he wrote was Ceramica Viva (Live Ceramics), reprinted many times (1979, 1989, 2003). His most recent book is Dizionario illustrato dei materiali e delle Tecniche ceramiche (An Illustrated Dictionary of Ceramic Materials and Techniques) 2004. Another cornerstone of ceramics literature, published in 1984 with an introduction by Gillo Dorfles, is Decorazione Ceramica (Ceramic Decoration), a topic intimately connected to artistic production. Gillo Dorfles wrote a critical essay on the state of the art of ceramics and he describes in it, with extraordinary clarity, the way Caruso works and his poetics, calling him "one of the few true lovers of this art, deeply initiated into all the deepest secrets of the technique" and also...