Nicola Verlato was born in Verona, Italy on the 19th of February 1965. He started to paint about the age of seven, and began to sell his paintings when he was nine. His artistic education has been quite unorthodox and he considers himself to be almost self taught. However, between the ages of nine to fourteen, he spent every summer at the studio of a monk-painter (Fra’ Terenzio) in the monastery nearby his village in north east Italy and he considers that to be the place where he learned how to draw in the academic style.
His first serious show was at the age of fifteen in the town hall of Lonigo, a three person show in collaboration with two other artists from the area. Nicola was also trained in classical music from the age of nine (classical guitar, lute, piano and composition) at the Conservatory in Verona. Later, his attention veered towards rock music, playing electric guitar, bass, synths, composing songs, jingles and soundtracks for documentaries. He also studied architecture at the University of Venice where he lived for almost thirteen years, painting portraits and allegorical scenes for the local aristocracy and the affluent foreigners living in the city. During this period in Venice he worked on almost everything that was connected with drawing: stage design, temporary decorations, illustrations, comics, storyboards, etc. Around the age of twenty eight he became interested in contemporary art, and consequentially started to show in numerous galleries in Italy and abroad, both in solo and group shows.
After spending seven years in Milan, where he created his well grounded notoriety in Italy, in 2004 Verlato decided to move to NY city. In these last years, he showed principally in NY city and in various galleries and museums around the States, Italy and Norway, but also in India as well as Germany, Holland and other European countries. He participated with an installation of paintings and sculptures as a representative of the Italian Pavillion at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Since 2011, Nicola Verlato has been living and working in Los Angeles.
“My work is about bodies and narrative and so forth, about mythologies, specifically mythologies of our time. I like to gather visual information about these phenomena and combine them together in a new and more complex kind of representation, a very finished painting in which all the information is organized in a coherent and structured way. This is thanks to a very articulated process that passes through drawing, three dimensional models in clay, 3D software and finally painting.” – Nicola Verlato (Art Pulse Magazine)
