Adele Pallavicino

Turin, Italy, a city at the foot of the Alps, is Adele Pallavicino’s home town: here she was born (1948) and grew up, completed her classical studies and graduated from university.
After getting married she moved to Genoa: a city by the sea, her husband’s hometown, the place where their children were brought up.

Adele learned from her mother, in childhood, to draw in pencil and china ink and to paint in watercolours. In her teens she started portraying family and friends in charcoals, and creating large photocollages. Her interest in photography was developing; in her bathroom/darkroom she printed her own photos.
One day, a dear friend, who was tidying up her childhood items, gave her a box of coloured chalks which started her off : inspired by family albums, she worked with chalks and pastels on paper, thus producing what she called “disegnoni” (big drawings), which where exhibited, as well as her watercolours on the same subject, in Galleria Parisina, Turin, 1975, in her first solo exhibition.
She continued experimenting with pastels on different textured paper until, feeling the need to paint on a larger scale than paper would permit, she started working in oils on canvas. In 1994 she exhibited her work in London, at the Fine Art Society, and after that in Milano, Torino, Genova, Valencia etc…
Adele is a keen photographer: photography is for her both a quick way to take “visual notes”, as an artistic medium in itself.

Educated to art in her family, where many were very good, if not professional, artists, during her high school years, in Turin, Adele was briefly a pupil of painter and art critic Riccardo Chicco, and went to the evening classes of the Scuola di Scenotecnica; but she learned mainly by looking at other artists work, both ancient as contemporary, and by drawing and painting full time. While studying in University, she worked for Studio Graficasola and Casa Editrice Paravia, involved in diverse graphic projects.
In 1990, a summer stage at the Scuola Superiore di Disegno, of Fondazione Ratti, in Como, directed by artists Francesco Somaini and Giuliano Collina, visiting professor Antonio Lopez Garcia, provided strength and inspiration to her painting as, later on (2000-02), the lessons and workshops by genoese photographer Giuliana Traverso gave impulse to her love for photography.