Mario Chichorro was born in 1932 in Torres Vedras, Portugal. He studied architecture at the Porto School of Fine Arts for 2 years, then worked in various architectural firms in Lisbon and Porto. In 1963, finding his country's regime too domineering, he decided to move to France, in the Pyrénées-Orientales region, where he continued to work with architects. In 1966, he married Caroline, a Catalan woman, and began painting. In 1968, he gave up architecture to devote himself entirely to painting...

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  Biography of Mario Chichorro

  Mario Chichorro was born in 1932 in Torres Vedras, Portugal. He studied architecture at the Porto School of Fine Arts for 2 years, then worked in various architectural firms in Lisbon and Porto. In 1963, finding his country's regime too domineering, he decided to move to France, in the Pyrénées-Orientales region, where he continued to work with architects. In 1966, he married Caroline, a Catalan woman, and began painting. In 1968, he gave up architecture to devote himself entirely to painting and art, a passion since his earliest childhood.
  In 1969, he held his first exhibition and was noticed by Jean Dubuffet, who invited him to take part in his Art Brut collection in Lausanne. "Brut and marginal? I don't mind (these days, I'm proud of it!), but you have to add a few other things: primitive, baroque, humorist, firefighter and, if you please, political anéanti, cultural saboteur, gentle anarchist, universalist without means, distancced humanist and even painter," he wrote in 1978.His works reflect his overflowing imagination, in which he expresses himself by sculpting, giving relief, favoring humor in his creations, sometimes tackling topical subjects and other themes such as the family, most often featuring characters on stage. Mario Chichorro uses a variety of materials: wood, agglomerated cork, deformed plastic, resin, glued fabrics and extruded polyurethane, his preferred material. His colors are vivid and varied.Mario Chichorro likes to define himself as an unclassifiable artist: "My choice is unreserved. I'm all for irreverence, insubordination, unrealism, the absurd, daydreaming, madness, utopia and desire. I am in solidarity with those who, by will or by force of circumstance, settle in the wild and fertile soil of the ideal and contribute, according to their means, to new and very different creation."The artist has produced several thousand works, and over a hundred exhibitions have shown his work in France and abroad (mainly in Europe).Numerous museums have exhibited his work, and it forms an integral part of major collections, including the Fabuloserie - collection d'Art Singulier d'Alain Bourbonnais in Yonne, the Musée d'Art Brut in Lausanne, the Hans Cajeth Museum in Heidelberg, the Musée Anatole Jakovsky in Nice, the Alphonse Chave collection in Saint Paul de Vence and the Musée Paul Valéry in Sète: many other cities own works by Mario Chichorro (Perpignan, Bègles, Dunkerque, Paris - Musée d'Histoire Contemporaine BDIC et Patrimoine Lu BSN -, Liège, Collioure, Caen, for example).
  
  

  

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