Colorful animal and human figures in silhouette give Carlo Zinelli’s hundreds of gouache-on-paper works a distinctive graphic style. Some of the horses, birds, people, and other creatures are pocked with circular voids or surrounded by text. This inscrutable script was part of Zinelli’s private iconographic system that evolved over the years as he created a monumental body of work in a psychiatric hospital in Verona, Italy.
Born in 1916 in San Giovanni Lupatoto, Italy, Zinelli left school at nine and worked on a farm. In 1934, he moved to Verona and apprenticed in a slaughterhouse. He served briefly in the military during the Spanish Civil War, but was discharged within months due to signs of mental illness. In 1947, he was committed to the San Giacomo della Tomba hospital, where he stayed until his death in 1974.
Zinelli initially drew on the hospital courtyard’s walls before, in 1957, joining an art workshop co-founded by the Scottish sculptor Michael Noble. With materials and space to create, he spent hours each day painting. Many of his earliest works referenced rural life, with silhouettes of dogs and goats alongside faces. Over time, his compositions became more complex, and he added collage elements and references to his military experience, with depictions of rifles and helmets. Frequently he covered both sides of a work with dense imagery. Calligraphic elements became central around the mid-1960s, with enigmatic words surrounding flat figures on stark white backgrounds. In his final years, he concentrated more on details in graphite and colored pencil, the fine lines revealing strange hybrid beasts and birds with incredible claws.
The largest number of Zinelli’s works are at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, and were donated by the psychiatrist Vittorino Andreoli. In 1963, Andreoli brought Zinelli’s work to the attention of Jean Dubuffet, who included him in the exhibition L’Art Brut at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 1967. In 2017, the American Folk Art Museum held the first museum exhibition of Zinelli’s work in the United States.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
