Draft:Giampietro Fontana

Giampietro Fontana, also Pietro Fontana ([Turin], 17 February 1934 - Thônex, 6 April 2020) was an Italian and Swiss painter. His work illustrates the interferences and contaminations between architecture and painting, particularly the motif of the Tower of Babel.

Background and training
Gp Fontana was born in Turin in 1934. His father was an officer in the Italian Royal Navy (Regia Marina) under Mussolini’s regime. After the second World war, the son was enlisted in the Naval College of Genua (Accademia navale). Gp Fontana stayed five years in the Italian Navy. He served on a torpedo-boat destroyer (caccia torpediniere) that cruised in the Mediterranean Sea. After the Navy his decision to migrate to Lausanne, Switzerland becomes effective in 1961. He finds a job in in an office of architecture and completes an apprenticeship of dessinateur architecte. His training in painting is both auto-didactical and academical. He attends courses in academic life drawing at the Département d’architecture of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne.

Life and works
In 1981, under the supervision of Conrad André Beerli, Gp Fontana defends at the EPFL in Lausanne a PhD thesis on Architecture italienne des années soixante en Italie, at the EPFL in Lausanne. The output is a sequence of 24 crayon polychrome drawings in a 70 x 70 cm square size. Each graphical composition documents an experimental moment in the development of Italian architecture in the Nineteenth Sixties. In 1991, Anne-Françoise Comte, a Swiss lawyer working in Geneva marries Gp Fontana.

Exhibitions and public commission
1980: Musée cantonal des beaux-arts in Lausanne, Les Portraits de Groupe. 1984: Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich, Überall ist Babylon. 1989: Musée des arts décoratifs Lausanne, Babylones vaudoises. 1991: University of Lausanne, Allégories pharmeutiques, Five decorative panels in the new School of Chemistry.