Maria Bonomi
Brazil, 1935
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
BiographyBorn in Meina, village located on the shores of Lake Maggiore, near Milan, in July 1935, Brazilian mother, Georgina Martinelli Bonomi, and Italian father, Ambrógio Bonomi, Maria Anna Olga Luiza Bonomi arrived in Brazil in 1946 and settled in Sao Paulo. Bonomi studied painting and drawing with Yolanda Mohalyi (1909-1978) in 1951 and Karl Plattner (1919-1989) in 1953. The following year she began engraving with Livio Abramo (1903-1992). Her first solo show was in Sao Paulo in 1956. That year, she received a scholarship from the Ingram-Merrill Foundation and went to study at the Pratt Institute Graphics Center in New York with painter Seong Moy (1921). In parallel, she studied engraving with Hans Müller and art theory with Meyer Schapiro (1904-1996) at Columbia University. Returning to Brazil, she attended the Metal Engraving Workshop with Johnny Friedlaender (1912-1992), at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, in 1959. The following year, in São Paulo, she founded the Gravure Studio, with Livio Abramo, who was her assistant until 1964. From the 1970s, she began to dedicate herself to sculpture producing large pieces for public spaces. In 1999, she defended her doctoral dissertation entitled Public Art.