Calabria and Rome

Nicola Simbari was born in 1927 in San Lucido, a fishing village on the Tyrrhenian coast of Calabria. His family moved to Rome while he was still a young child, when his father found work as an architect and builder at the Vatican. Growing up among the artistic and architectural monuments of Rome had a lasting effect on Simbari. Findlay’s archival biography records that by the age of seven he already knew and admired Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.

Simbari spent four years studying painting and architecture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. His aptitude for architecture reportedly earned him a faculty appointment at the Accademia, but painting remained his principal ambition, and he relinquished the post to devote himself fully to his studio practice. Architectural training nevertheless continued to shape his art. Even his most freely handled paintings are organized by a firm underlying structure, carefully balanced intervals, and a clear understanding of how figures and forms occupy space.

Early Career and International Recognition

Simbari’s first solo exhibition was presented in Rome in 1953. That same year, he received an award for his stage design for the musical Tarantella Napoletana. In 1954, the Italian State awarded him a gold medal for a poster entered in a national competition. These early achievements reveal the breadth of his practice, which extended beyond easel painting into illustration, theatrical design, and large-scale public work.

His first solo exhibition in London followed in 1957. In 1958, he was commissioned to create murals for the Italian Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, an important international platform during the formative years of his career. Exhibitions in London and New York followed in 1959, and in 1960 he presented his first solo exhibition at Wally Findlay Galleries in Palm Beach. By the following year, his work was being shown through Findlay Galleries in Palm Beach, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago.

The Development of Simbaresco

Simbari’s mature style developed through a sustained dialogue between figuration and abstraction. Early in his career, he engaged closely with the European avant-garde. Georges Braque and Joan Miró were important initial influences, followed by an admiration for Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Nicolas de Staël. His early paintings were often small works in egg tempera, executed entirely with brushes and built from restrained passages of ochre and gray. Their concentrated scale and subdued atmosphere differ markedly from the expansive color and physical energy for which he later became known.

Travel broadened Simbari’s subjects and transformed his understanding of color. He came to recognize the dramatic contrasts produced by Italian and Mediterranean light, gradually eliminating many of the darker tones from his palette. Although he experimented with Abstract Expressionism, Geometric Abstraction, and other modernist languages, he continued to describe himself as a figurative artist. People and their relationship to place remained central to his work.

The style that emerged became known as “Simbaresco.” In these paintings, recognizable figures and settings are reconstructed through broken planes, swift linear accents, broad passages of color, and thickly worked surfaces. Red and blue, yellow and violet, and other complementary pairings create the sensation of vibration that Simbari sought. Rather than using pure black, he developed deep purple tones that provided structure without diminishing the brilliance of the surrounding colors.

His subjects ranged across the world he observed: the Italian countryside, fishing villages, beaches, boats, flower-filled gardens, cafés, festivals, processions, city streets, and figures beneath the Mediterranean sun. Whether depicting an intimate interior or a crowded public spectacle, Simbari sought to communicate what he described as one’s “truest feelings, about life and about people.”

Materials, Printmaking, and Sculpture

Simbari was meticulous about his materials. He carefully prepared his canvases, mixed his own pigments, and continually tested new colors and tonal relationships. Brushes were generally reserved for establishing the background. He then developed the painting with palette knives, maintaining approximately twenty-five sizes that ranged from very small tools for precise accents to large knives capable of laying down broad fields of pigment.

The palette knife allowed Simbari to combine color, drawing, and relief in a single action. Thick ridges of paint catch and redirect light, while scraped passages reveal underlying layers. His architectural training gave these energetic surfaces their internal order. Forms may appear spontaneous, but their placement, weight, and relationship to the surrounding space are carefully controlled.

While traveling, Simbari recorded subjects in pencil and pastel before returning to his studio to develop them as paintings. He preferred to work beneath the strong light of the Italian sky, often accompanied by the music of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Palestrina. This combination of observation, memory, structure, and sensory experience helped turn each painting into a personal record of a place or encounter.

Around 1970, Simbari expanded his practice into lithography and sculpture. His prints ranged from figurative compositions related to his paintings to more experimental works combining collage, photography, and painted imagery. He selected fine Fabriano papers and worked closely with his printers throughout the production of each edition.

His sculptural work grew directly from the physicality of his paintings. After creating an early figurative sculpture with a specially developed oro bronzo patina, he produced larger works in cast and synthetic materials, frequently introducing color to their surfaces. Simbari explained this approach simply: “I’m still a painter.” For him, colored sculpture was a natural extension of the dense impasto and tactile presence already central to his canvases.

Findlay Galleries and Legacy

Simbari’s relationship with Wally Findlay Galleries became one of the defining partnerships of his career. From his first Palm Beach exhibition in 1960, the gallery presented his work across the United States and Europe through an extensive sequence of solo exhibitions and thematic projects. Among these were Le Cirque in New York, Palm Beach, and Paris; The Mediterranean in Paris; Thirteen Cityscapes and The Caribbean in New York; and Simbari and His World in Palm Beach.

In 1997, Findlay Galleries mounted simultaneous Simbari exhibitions in New York, Palm Beach, and Chicago. A second three-city presentation followed in 2001 with The Retrospective: Celebrating 50 Years of Achievement. Later exhibitions included Seven Decades in 2011, the 2015 retrospective devoted to his mastery of the palette knife, Mediterraneo in 2021, and The Italian Palette Knife Master in 2023.

Simbari’s work entered private, corporate, and public collections in Europe and the United States. Confirmed museum holdings include Interior in Gold at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the 1969 lithograph Target at the Ellen Noël Art Museum, and the 1966 painting Garden at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. The latter entered the museum through the William Wadsworth Findlay Memorial.

Nicola Simbari died in Italy in 2012. His work remains distinguished by its fusion of disciplined composition and physical spontaneity, as well as by an intensely personal response to color, light, movement, and Mediterranean life. Findlay Galleries continues to present his paintings and preserve the extensive exhibition and archival record formed through more than six decades of representation.

Close biography