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Melrose Studios to exhibit at Arndean Gallery, Cork Street
(24th-29th October 2005) |
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Melrose Studios to exhibit at the inaugural Edinburgh Café art fair (17th-20th November 2005).
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Michael Rizzello (1926-2004)
A Sculptor Courted by Royalty and World Leaders and Yet Little Known in the Art World.
Anthony J. Lester, FRSA
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While some artists, such as Damien Hurst (b. 1965) and Tracy Emin (b. 1963), actively seek all the hype they can pump out of the media circus, others choose to keep an almost too minimal profile. The 20th century art scene is littered with mega-talent, which, outside a certain framework, is by-and-large not known. One such artisan was Michael Gaspard Rizzello, OBE, who much preferred just to beaver away than court publicity. While he does indeed get entries in such standard reference books as James Mackay’s indispensable The Dictionary of Sculptors in Bronze (published by the Antique Collectors’ Club), David Buckman’s The Dictionary of Artists in Britain since 1945 (Art Dictionaries Ltd) and Who’s Who in Art (Hilmarton Manor Press), it was not until his daughter mounted a major retrospective exhibition at the Mall Galleries, London in April this year, that the public had the opportunity of fully appreciating Rizzello’s remarkable breadth of talent.
Michael was born in London on April 2, 1926, the youngest son of Arthur Marius Rizzello, an Italian tailor who moved to England in the mid-1920s, via Marseilles.
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MICHAEL RIZZELLO
Article by Simon Tait |
Michael Rizzello's Putney home of 30 years is a house with a history. It's a Victorian villa which was radically adapted in the 1960s to include a large "clean" studio on the top floor, and a vast detached sculpture studio in the garden - designed by Coventry Cathedral's architect, Sir Basil Spence.
When Rizzello made it his own in 1976, it was destined not only to be a home for his family, but to display his work and help him build on a career which was already flourishing. For thirty years he created sculptures at an astonishing rate, and slowly filled his home and studio with them. Today it looks just as it was when he died suddenly last September, aged 78.
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