Composer and conceptual artist, Giuseppe Chiari was born in Florence on 26 September 1926. In Florence, in parallel with his university studies in mathematics and engineering (1946-51), he devoted himself to music by studying piano and composition. Attracted in particular by the experiences of John Cage, Chiari became interested in experimental research in visual music, promoting the association Vita musicale contemporanea with Pietro Grossi in 1961; of great importance for Chiari's artistic development were, in the early 1960s, his coming into contact with with Sylvano Bussotti, his confrontation with the concrete poetry research of Group 70, and finally his contacts with the New York exponents of the international Fluxus movement, which the artist joined by participating in 1962 in the Fluxus internationale Festspiele neuester Musik in Wiesbaden.
In addition to group exhibitions, from Documenta 5 in Kassel (1972) to the Venice Biennale (1972; 1976; 1978) to the Biennale in Sydney (1990), Chiari developed his complex artistic career through numerous concerts and performances in Europe and the United States.
An advocate of the interaction between music, language, gesture and image, Chiari has developed actions that are linked to neo-Dadaist and conceptual experiences: short pieces converge, from time to time and without a pre-established order, in complex musical pièces, aimed at exalting the freedom of expression and the concept of indeterminacy of artistic making.
In fact, Chiari composed 'action music' based on a complex method of performance that, alongside traditional instruments, takes as its essential components random or aleatory sound elements (water, dry leaves, stones) that offer the cue for re-elaborations and actions that find precisely in randomness and improvisation the constant essence of his research (Gesti su un piano, 1962; La strada, 1965; Suonare la città, 1965).
From the first scores, in which the signs of the notes or the graphic representations of the gestures to be performed take on such visual evidence that they also impose themselves as autonomous images, and pure visual products, Chiari came to experiment with different means of expression: from collages to pictorial-gestural solutions elaborated with signs, writings and stamps on staves, sheet music and photographs, which found full and mature expression in the 1980s.
In 2017, as part of the initiatives promoted on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Giuseppe Chiari's death, the exhibition PentaChiari - five art galleries simultaneously celebrate the work of Giuseppe Chiari, curated by Bruno Corà, took place in five galleries including Frittelli Arte, in Florence and Prato.
Among his writings, special mention should be made of: Musica senza contrappunto (1969); Senza titolo (1971); Musica madre (1973); Teatrino (1974); Arte (1974); Il metodo per suonare (1976); Aesthetik (1984); Dubbio sull'armonia (1990); Musica et cetera (1994).
He died in Florence in May 2007.
