Guy Harloff, 1954, Gouache & Pastel & Paper

Wonderful Guy Harloff large abstract painting
Signed, titled and dated on the back “Guy Harloff Positano 1954”
Paper on canvas. Mixed technique
The work is protected by a acrylic glass showcase.
This painting, never before on the market, comes from an important European private collection.

Every item of our Gallery, upon request, is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Sabrina Egidi official Expert in Italian furniture for the Chamber of Commerce of Rome and for the Rome Civil Courts.

Guy Harloff (1933-1991) is a Franco-Dutch painter, draughtsman, engraver and collagist.
During his life as an artist, he lived mainly between London, Milan, Paris and New York.
In his youth, he worked as an assistant to Vittorio De Sica in 19501, before turning his attention to the various religious rites and their symbolism, mysticism and alchemy, as well as the vernacular forms taken by writing.
from 1954 onwards, he produced a series of polychrome drawings and watercolours marked by these elements, exhibiting for the first time in Florence, at the Galeria Numero, and then in 1959, at Arturo Schwarz in Milan.
He became friends with William Burroughs and Édouard Roditi,Harold Norse, and Nanos Valaoritis.

On 14 July 1960, he took part in the first European happening, L'Enterrement de la Chose de Tinguely, organised by Jean-Jacques Lebel as part of the Venice Biennale and alongside the exhibition L'Anti-Procès, at the Palazzo Contarini Corfú, with Gregory Corso, Peggy Guggenheim, Harold Acton and others.

In 1972, Guy Harloff took part in documenta 5 in Cassel, showing six paintings and a few collages as part of the event's theme, Individual Mythology.
In the 1970s, he began a series of drawings and collages inspired by carpets, an object that fascinated the artist, and whose central motif was the eye.
The central motif was the eye, always Harloff's right eye, which he transposed as a symbol of the centre of the universe, vision and the Third Eye.
He had studied them and sold some when he was living in Paris in the 1950s.
His visits to Iran and Morocco in the 1960s left many souvenirs of this art.
The "carpet" series includes drawings with collages of photographs of eyes, probably his own, drawn during his stays at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.

Between 1964 and 1991, some of his works illustrated the record sleeves of musicians associated with free jazz.

A globetrotter and navigator, he died in January 1991 in Galliate.