Nino Longobardi was born in Naples in 1953.
He had a training in the field, as a self-taught, completed by frequently attending art galleries and meeting some of the masters of his field: Carlo Alfarano, Joseph Beyus, Filiberto Menna, Achille Bonito Oliva, Lucio Amelio. With his warm gesture and a research conducted on the path of introspection, from the 80s Longobardi is a member of the "neo impressionist" school, which, thanks to the rediscovery of craftsmanship, takes hold especially in Italy, in Germany and in the USA, as a response to the coldness and repetitiveness that the Conceptual Art had brought to its highest point in the previous decade. Along with the poetic of the Transavanguardia, his research leads to a new analysis of subjectivity and returns to use materiality: the painted canvas, the chromatic mix, the drawing, through which he reveals and narrates the human being relying on a "figuration full of romantic and mystic memories willing to tap into both the "reality from the outside world" and the interiority suspended between the concrete experience and the realization of the dream" (Valter Trione).
His works are massively influenced by a visceral connection with his homeland. Solid source of inspiration, to Longobardi the genius loci is a perpetual research among his own cultural and geographic origins. Deeply linked to the history and culture of Naples and the Mediterranean world, there are some elements that constantly return in Longobardi's art, up to become symbols: skulls, human bodies, graffiti and wall relief are now freed from any macabre, morbid and funeral shade, now finally able to explore a germinal beauty where to find the sources of language. So we meet figures that evoke the Etruscan statuary, looking like the inhabitants of the silent temples and crypts, in order to reveal a secret that is ancient, yet so present. According to Longobardi, the work of art should be able to express deep and authentic truths, aiming to capture the essence of bodies and objects; from his point of view art is a language that has the duty to wonder what comes first and what follows. "I am sure that, often, we tend to forget about our origins, about the possibility to slow our frenetic rhythms down. I need to feel close to the "ancient" world. I like to call myself a classical artist, able to look at 2500, aware of the past, present and future...".
The years that mark the debut of Longobardi are the ones in which the artist focuses on studying space and its composition, analysed through paints on paper and walls but also by interpreting the canvas in an architectonical and sculptural way and recontextualizing those objects related to pictorial actions. What emerges is a strongly expressive trait, preferring pencil and charcoal. "Aside from painting, I have always done other things: installations, drawings, sculptures... even while I was painting I had always used a minimal, essential coloring". Longobardi goes beyond artistic schools and trends, remaining absolutely independent and facing recurring elements with coherence and constance: "instead of filling his canvas up with different images, he always goes back to a unique topic, that is "distinctively his own" . He prefers to work of the same figures, updating them, bringing in some small changes, barely visible modifications". (Valter Trione)
The gestural and compositional expressions of Longobardi undergo a sudden transformation, as a result of the earthquake that destroyed the region of Campania in 1980: the event brought tension into the artist's language, which responds to the destroying power of nature with works like Terra Motus (1980), now at Madre Museum of Naples and Senza Titolo, kept in the Terrae Motus collection in the Reggia di Caserta.
At the end of the 70s Longobardi exhibits at Europa 79 di Stoccarda, at Arte Cifra, at Paul Maenz Gallery in Colonia and at Centre d'Art Contemporain in Ginevra. In the 80s his works reach a worldwide recognition. His language makes a gradual and progressive reduction of the human body, till presenting it in its "final structure", defined by the artist by lightening the matter, turning its figures in prints, moulds.
In 1982 he participates to Italian Art Now: an American Perspective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and at Avanguardia e Transavanguardia at the Mura Aureliane in Rome. His work continues to be known and appreciated at international level, with exhibitions at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, at the Mirò Foundation in Barcelona ('83), at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin ('86), at Grand Palais in Paris ('87) and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Copenaghen ('88).
In the 90s the artist participates at the XII Quadriennale, Ultima Generazione, and is the protagonist of an exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan with the realization of two banners for the Bandiere di Maggio in Piazza Plebiscito. In 2013 he exhibits at Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, and two years later he participates at the 56th edition of the Biennale di Venezia, joining the exhibition Codice Italia at the national pavilion, invited by Vincenzo Trione.
Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. has already presented the artworks by Nino Longobardi in his historical site in Bologna with an exhibition in 2003, focused on the artist's production between 2000 and 2002: thanks to a selection of works it was possible to dive into the visual universe of an artist focused on revealing those "fundamental forces of being" (Flavio Caroli), deposited in the collective subconscious and brought to light thanks to images full of evocative power.
In October 2006 Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. threw a new light on the artwork "Senza Titolo" (1999) with the exhibition "Pièce Unique": the human figure, always present in Longobardi's work, is once again the protagonist, but it is now filtered by the concept of dynamism.