150724218Carlo Zinelli19161974Colorful 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 <em>L’Art Brut</em> 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). CarloZinellihttps://collection.folkartmuseum.org/internal/media/dispatcher/3921/fullThe graphic production of Carlo Zinelli, despite its consistency, draws four distinct phases. The initial compositions (1956– 1959) are populated with farm life scenes displaying motifs in pure colors that would later become recurrent in his oeuvre: birds, goats, flora, buildings and silhouettes with stylized faces looking to the left. The second phase (1960–1964) confirmed his favorite themes, alluding to his disturbing experiences of the war: rifles and pistols, alpine troops with military helmets, and alpine churches. His compositions display a sparing use of color (matching tones, creation of shade, unified backgrounds) and dexterity. The ordering of subjects into clusters of four, bodies covered with quadruple circles (suggesting bullet perforations), and repeated semicolon-shaped figures (defined as “little priests”) are trademarks. Highly productive, Zinelli often turned his sheet over to continue on the back. The third phase (1965–1967) identifies with his ornamental calligraphic system made of letters, numbers, words, and decipherable sentences (prayers, nursery rhymes, reveries), which echo the artist’s fragmented speech. The “groups of four” are abandoned, giving rise to a leading figure depicted over starry or white backgrounds with features like syringes, stars, alpine soldiers with hooked noses, and horses. Drawings from the fourth phase (1968–1974) are dramatically detailed, many brimming with feather-like, undulating hatchings. Incorporating graphite and colored pencils, tones gradually fade. Zinelli traced his subjects in a fine line and immersed them in a cloud of varied strokes, delicately formed with the tip of his brush.Adapted from text by Valérie Rousseau in Carlo Zinelli 1916–1974, exhibition brochure (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2017).(1916–1974)San Giovanni LupatotoVeronaSan Giovanni LupatotoVeronaSan Giovanni LupatotoVeronaCarlo Zinelli