Niele Toroni

Originally from Muralto but resident in Paris for over 40 years, Niele Toroni is an important contemporary painter. He was born on March 9, 1937 in Ticino and moved to the French capital at just over 22 years old; here the Ticinese inaugurated his “Travail-Peinture“, a painting technique that consists of leaving multiple imprints of n° 50 brushes 30 centimeters apart from each other on walls and other types of surfaces. Toroni made his debut in Paris in 1967 on the occasion of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture at the Musèe d’Art Moderne; in the same year he participated in the city Biennale and founded the artistic group BMPT, of which he was a member together with Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset and Michel Parmentier. During his career, the painter has participated in important exhibitions in France (for example at the Centre Pompidou in Paris), Germany, Austria, Italy (at the Venice Biennale), Japan and the United States (at the MoMA in New York), winning the Grand Prix National de la Peinture en France in 1995. Eight years later, he received the Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis in Cologne and in 2012 he was awarded the Prix Meret Oppenheim, a prize named after the Swiss artist and photographer who died in 1985.