Pugliese artist and teacher Pippo Patruno dies at 68

Pippo Patruno, an artist and teacher from Puglia, died at age 68. Born in Monopoli in 1955, he graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts of Bari, where he taught artistic anatomy for many years. He debuted with a show in 1975 and later collaborated with major Puglian galleries including Centro Sei, Museo Nuova Era, and Galleria Lidia Carrieri. A lasting partnership with Galleria Bonomo saw him explore language through painting and minimal graphic developments, using repeated acronyms, phrases, and words in chromatic shifts. In his later years, he shifted to conceptual collages using materials from the Bonomo archive—old Artforum issues, photographs, and personal invitations—reassembling past and present into personal time capsules. His final show in 2019 at Museo Nuova Era in Bari featured original packaging as conceptual maps, with accumulations of documents, records, books, and ephemera like the Woodstock vinyl, the Italian first edition of Mao's Little Red Book, Valerie Solanas's SCUM manifesto, and photos of Jan Palach and Italian soldiers in Africa. These works combined private and collective memories with ironic contrasts, sometimes photographed and disturbed by a central perforated word. Patruno was known for his rigor, reserve, and sincere smile.