Biography

Amalia Del Ponte (Milan, 936) lives and works in Milan and Venice.
A pupil of Marino Marini at Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera between 1956 and 1961, she has been working for years on a personal, independent research matching her formal rigor with her interest for archetypes, a subject connecting art with the problems of science.

Since the beginning of her activity, in the early 1960s, she has addressed the question of the void, of light, and of the inner structure of matter.

Amalia Del Ponte began her artistic journey working with the traditional materials of sculpture: plaster, terracotta, marble, bronze.

She started using thermosetting resins in 1963, and acrylic resins in 1964. Later that year, she exhibited her first Perspex prisms, the outcome of her research on the effects of light reflection and refraction, in a group show at Galleria Montenapoleone in Milan, presented by Gillo Dorfles, and in 1965 at Galleria Adelphi in Padua. In June 1966 she was invited by Guido Ballo to take part to the Salone Internazionale dei Giovani (International Salon for Young Artists) in Venice, where she showed her early Perspex pieces; during the following year, the exhibition traveled to Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan and Promotrice delle Belle Arti in Turin. In February 1967 Del Ponte exhibited more Perspex structures in a solo exhibit at Galleria Vismara in Milan; on that occasion Vittorio Fagone chose the term Tropi (Tropes) as a definition of such works.