Biography of Giovanni Gariboldi

Giovanni Gariboldi is an Italian gallerist. Born in Milan on January 4th 1964, the city where he studied Architecture, from the young age he was attracted to the Modern Art. During his first years of university he began working as a dealer, developing a strong interest in informal art of the 1950s. When he was just twenty-five years old he opened a studio in Via Ciro Menotti in Milan, where his gallery project began to take shape. In fact, in the early 1990s, he inaugurated a gallery in Corso Monforte 23.

Dating from this period the encounter with the Informal Italian art, the trips to Paris in order to deepen his knowledge of not yet celebrated by history and by the art market painters and sculptors. The first exhibitions take shape and it is immediate the originality of the proposal which strongly focuses on the research that aims to the deepening and relaunching of the 1950s and, more in general, of the post-war art, an important historical period for the city of Milan and for the history of the international art. Studio Gariboldi started to attract the attention of the critics: unexpected were the visits of Lea Vergine and the sincere words in reviews in the newspapers, as in case of Sebastiano Grasso in Corriere della Sera.

After ten years of work, the location of the gallery expanded its spaces by moving to Via San Damiano 2, where the recognition of the international Informal art and related developments of the 1960s began. Lo Savio, Soto, Gianni Colombo to name a few. The participation to the major national art fairs also became an important appointment, always conceived in the perspective of quality proposals. The gallery line keeps its promises of coherence and intrinsic value of the works, never forgetting its roots and founding ideals.

In 2003 his son Francesco was born and Giovanni Gariboldi decided to move from Via San Damiano to a gentrified area of Via Ventura. Situated in the Ex Faema area, it became a new artistic district of VenturaLambrate, where the major contemporary Milanese, but not only, galleries started gradually to move. De Carlo, Minini, Zero experienced a synergy of vernissages and white nights, coming into close contact with the wave of the Fuori Salone during the Milan Design Week, which will appropriate the area for at least a decade. This was the period of exhibitions dedicated to Salvatore Scarpitta, Nobuya Abe, Ray Parker and Calderara, the invention of Dialoghi (Dialogues) between the art objects, the setting up of Mirko’s forest together with the adolescent kids of a neighborhood school and the symbolic Unpacking, an exhibition held during the lockdown period that followed the 2020 pandemic, in which all the works were lying in the gallery, packed in large wooden boxes, stacked in an orderly mess, anxious to be seen and be accessible again to the public, once the lockdown would end.

Upon the resumption of the activity in June 2022, Giovanni Gariboldi believes that the time is ripe to return to the gallery location in the center of Milan, putting back the focus on exhibition activity and to the elite collecting. For Giovanni “elite” means the understanding of art, expression of taste and trust in the gallery’s proposal. He rediscovers the founding literary collaborations and the original address of Corso Monforte 23 in Palazzo Cicogna, relaunching the new exposition space without forgetting all the online awareness implemented in the previous years. The website, the presence on social media networks, bright rooms equipped with modern reception comforts, a new energy and the will to communicate his own mature vision of art.

Studio Gariboldi puts the relationship between the gallerist and the collectors, the press and, in general, with all the public, at the center of its work. In the new project returns the dimension of the research but most of all the encounter and the opening to the city, as a place of artistic and cultural exchange, contrasting the closure imposed by planetary conditions and by Italian socio-economic conditions.