Alberto Biasi

Alberto Biasi was born in Padua on 2 June 1937. During the war he moved for a short period to his paternal grandmother’s in Carrara San Giorgio, a small village near Padua. A motherless orphan, at the end of the war he returned to Padua where he went to junior and secondary school and later enrolled in the classical high school. His attitude towards art disciplines, however, impelled him to complete his high school art diploma and to enrol, in 1958, in the architecture institute in Venice and, in 1962, the higher industrial design course.

In this period he taught drawing and art history in state schools and, from the early 1970s until 1988, he was professor of advertising graphics in the Padua professional institute. His career in art coincided with the formation of the Gruppo Enne, an association of students of architecture with whom Biasi took part in such art events as the IV Biennale Giovanile d’Arte di Cittadella, where he was awarded a prize conferred by Virgilio Guidi. In 1960 he took part in the series of exhibitions at the Galleria Azimut in Milan, and with Enrico Castellani, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, and Manfredo Massironi he exhibited in the show La nuova concezione artistica organised at the Circolo del Pozzetto in Padua

During his frequent visits to Milan, at the time the crossroad of internationally-knoen artists, Biasi and Massironi developed the idea of founding the Gruppo N, that in a short time was to become a protagonist of the main national and international shows of Kinetic art. Besides opening a gallery in Padua, the Gruppo N joined the movement “New Tendencies” and exhibited at Zagreb, Paris, and Venice, coming into contact with other European experimenters. In 1962 the Gruppo N exhibited in the travelling show Arte Programmata – a title referring to computer software – organised by Bruno Munari and hosted in the Olivetti shops in Milan, Rome, and Venice, and in galleries and museums in London and America. In 1964 the Gruppo N was invited to the XXXII Venice Biennale and, in the following year, the MoMA, New York, to take part in the famous show The Responsive Eye.