Carla Carli Mazzucato was born in Appiano, amid the Alps of northern Italy, in 1935. Though her early childhood was nestled in the beauty and peace of the fertile Adige River Valley, the onset of World War II and the death of both of Carla’s parents soon after, quickly transformed young Carla’s life into one of new challenges and personal adversity.
While working to help support her family, Carla completed her middle-school education independently, and eventually went on to attend the Cà Foscari Academy in Venice and the Università Cattolica in Milan.
In 1962, Carla married Giuseppe Mazzucato and traveled to the United States where she began a new life — started a family, learned a new language, explored a new culture. And she began to paint.
Carla revisited her homeland on canvas, pouring the images that sprang from her memory onto her chosen medium of expression. Soon, her work revealed a quality beyond simple mastery of technique; her art captured something intangible from the subjects she painted. Patrons who viewed her first, small exhibit in Michigan, U.S.A., in 1969, saw a collection of memories stirred with emotion. The art not only described the artist’s past; it suggested the mood that molded her perception of that past.
By 1982, Mazzucato’s work began appearing regularly in New York City, and shows in Toronto, Canada; Dallas, Chicago and Palm Springs, U.S.A. soon followed. In 1990, Carla Carli Mazzucato completed work on her first large-scale commission — a series of fourteen original oil paintings depicting the passion of Christ, installed by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in the Church of Corpus Domini in Bolzano, Italy.
Drawing from her extensive travels, Mazzucato painted her impressions of the world that she herself witnessed. Her journeys to Poland and Russia in 1991 yielded a series of works inspired by Eastern Europe’s reawakening. Galleries in Bologna and Prato, Italy, presented those works in 1993 and 1996. She traveled to Spain and France, and often returned to Italy, exhibiting works from those travels in the SoHo district of New York City in 1996 and 1998.
Critics in the U.S. and Europe found her work “dynamic,” “graceful”... “timeless.” While her paintings were compared to the masterworks of Chagall, Renoir, Monet and Van Gogh, she was dubbed a “modern expressionist” by Samuel Sachs II, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, in 1994. Her style set her apart from other 20th century artists, and in 1999, her commissioned painting, “Evening at the Opera” was unveiled as the inaugural work of art in the public collection on display at the Detroit Opera House. Other honors and awards followed, and in 2000, Mazzucato was recognized as a leading contemporary artist by the SoHo Fine Arts Institute in New York City.
Mazzucato’s work has been exhibited worldwide, and the United States, Canada, Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Korea and Japan are home to numerous private and corporate collections that include her art.
A 2007 documentary film entitled, “Carla Carli Mazzucato — an artist’s journey,” chronicles the artist’s life, from the land of her youth, through the changing landscape of post-war Italy, to America, where her artistic expression flourished and established a bold, new vision in the world of contemporary art.
The autobiography, SEASONS, published in 2021, explores Mazzucato's journey in greater detail through her own thoughts and reflections on the events, both historical and personal, that shaped her life. It is a story of innocence splintered by war, of searching for purpose and opportunity, of unfailing optimism and enduring hope.
Mazzucato
classic art — contemporary vision
biography
biography
