FRANCESCO POLENGHI

Francesco Polenghi (1936 – 2020) was an Italian painter based in Milan. After studying economics at New York University in the 1960s, Polenghi returned to Milan to work in advertising, while also carrying out in-depth research into the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, the Portuguese-Jewish philosopher, and developing his early painting style. Polenghi then spent much of the 1980s in India, where he lived in an ashram and continued to study philosophy and religion, particularly advaita vedanta, a school of Hindu
philosophy. When he moved back to Italy in 1988, Polenghi focused more intently on painting, creating an extensive body work that synthesized his studies into philosophy and his experiences across Italy, the United States, and India.

Polenghi worked in a process of “psychic automatism” in which he first covered the canvas with a network of densely layered brushstrokes. Working in a type of meditative trance, Polenghi then repeatedly traced over this first layer. He would build up the lines and forms of paintings, and sometimes incorporate multiple colors, until he felt the canvas could no longer withstand additional layers of mark-making, all the while chanting the Gayatri mantra.

Arturo Schwarz, the Italian poet, historian, and Marcel Duchamp expert, was an early champion of Polenghi’s work. In 2003, Schwarz organized the first major Polenghi exhibition at the Fondazione Mudima in Milan. Polenghi passed away in Milan in 2020, at age eighty-four.