Avati - Set Of Four Engravings

No. 1: "The Venetian Pedestal Table" 5 STATE 9/13 Signed AVATIN No. 2: "Where One Dreams of Kamakura" 3 STATE 9/13 Signed AVATI No. 3: "A Man with Couperin" 7 STATE 9/13 Signed AVATI No. 4: "The Acidic Taste of Lemon Yellow" 5 STATE 1/13 Signed AVATI Dimensions (sight): 27cm x 33.5cm. The painter-engraver Mario Avati was born in Monaco in 1921. After studying at the National School of Decorative Arts in Nice and the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, Mario Avati practiced all engraving techniques from 1947 onwards. Ten years later, he turned almost exclusively to mezzotint, first in black and white, then, from 1969, in color. Meticulous and delicate, this technique lends the works great depth and creates an ethereal space from which the motif emerges. The artist contributed to reviving this graphic technique as a medium of popular expression. Along with Kyoshi Hasegawa and Yozo Hamaguch, Mario Avati is one of the most singular practitioners of the mezzotint technique in the contemporary era. His work, deeply inspired by classical art, revolves almost exclusively around still lifes—fruits, flowers, staged objects, musical instruments—or animals, rendered with great geometric rigor. Inspired by the work of Giorgio Morand, whom he admired, Mario Avati arranged and organized his engravings in a way reminiscent of the composition of Morandi's paintings. In addition to producing hundreds of prints, Mario Avati illustrated numerous bibliophile editions (Lewis Carroll, Baudelaire, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Brillat-Savarin, Nostradamus, the Bible, etc.). His works are found in numerous museums worldwide, including some thirty institutions in France, such as the Chalcography Department of the Louvre Museum, and internationally at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the National Library of Madrid, the Tokyo Museum, the Johannesburg Museum of Art, as well as in important private collections. The artist lived and worked in Paris for many years. He died there in 2009.