Painter, draughtsman and collagist, born on 4 June 1933 in Paris, died in 1991 in Galliate (province of Novara, Italy).
Life
As a child he travelled around Europe with his parents, then grew up in Paris, which he left as a teenager, abandoning family and studies. In 1950 he settled in Rome and worked at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia; passionate about cinema, he worked with Vittorio De Sica and made two short films that remained unreleased until 2019. In the early 1950s he began to draw, close to Surrealism, and composed collages from salvaged materials.
In Rome he met the writers of the Beat Generation (Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs) and developed a passion for jazz; he was later to spend time with Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus. In 1959-1960 he was supported in Italy by Carlo Cardazzo and Arturo Schwarz. He travelled in the Persian Gulf, lived for a time in Morocco and journeyed through Africa as far as Sudan. In the early 1960s, in Milan, he mixed with Roberto Crippa and Lucio Fontana and worked with the gallerist Renzo Cortina.
Dividing his time between Milan, Paris and London at the end of the 1960s, he lived in New York from 1970. Harald Szeemann invited him to documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972. Back in Italy, he lived in Galliate, where he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1991.
The work
He worked in collage, coloured ink and pencil on paper, as a miniaturist, through the accumulation of signs. Steeped in alchemy, Tantrism, Sufism and the Kabbalah, his work crosses Surrealist, Symbolist and Neo-Dada references with Jewish, Eastern and Arab allegories. Recurring motifs include mandalas, letters of the alphabet, the vessels of the “great journey”, books of knowledge, Persian carpets, the heart, the tree of life and the alchemists’ “Royal Way”, with inscriptions and dates accompanying the image. Dino Buzzati saw him as a “gentle giant, painter and alchemist”.
“The concept is that of the Royal Way of the Alchemists. To make a spiritual journey. Each work is therapy. Repetition. Rite. Discovery and possession.” (Guy Harloff, 1974)
Exhibitions and collections
- 1972: documenta 5, Kassel
- 1974: anthological exhibition at the Permanente, Milan, with a concert by Ornette Coleman
- 1977: 10th Rome Quadriennale
- 2019: “Guy Harloff (1933/1991). Alchimie e sinestesie”, Centro Culturale di Milano
- At the gallery: Painting=Alchemy Painting=Terapia, 1963, ink and gouache on paper, diameter 40 cm, shown in the gallery’s summer exhibition (10-26 July 2025)