Andrea “Bobo” Marescalchi was born in Rome on 14 September 1954.

At secondary school in Florence he studied art and then went on to the Accademia di Belle Arti, which he left after a few months. 

 

In 1975 Bobo began producing graphics for Olivetti as well as creating books of photographs for models. However, his greatest interest was in the oriental art of calligraphy. He studied the techniques and materials and practised intensively to reproduce the speed of the gesture. Several years later this passion led him to take lessons from a Japanese calligrapher in Milan.

 

Starting in the 1980s Bobo became an assistant to Alighiero Boetti. In his works for Boetti he used a sublime drawing technique to produce the major sequences of magazine covers (Copertine), as well as the pencil-drawn elements that were later assembled in the Carte and Donnine series and in numerous other works. In the same period he began to collaborate with Sol Lewitt, operating as one of his hands in the large Wall Drawing series, which led them to travel all over Europe and America.

 

In 1981-82 Bobo met Pedro Riz à Porta and Luca Pancrazzi, developing with them an artistic collaboration that spurred them to take part together in various events and shows in venues where people listened to music and did graffiti.

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From the end of the 1980s, partly as a result of an intensive dialogue with Giovan Battista Salerno, he developed a style in which the objectivity of the image was fused with unexpected elements. In these works, playing cards, magic squares, geometrical shapes and symbolic numbers were superimposed on colours (principally red and yellow) over a base painting executed in Indian ink in shades of black and grey.

 

Bobo was fascinated by mathematics, by numerical symbolism, by repetition and arithmetic perfection. These elements come into play in the frequent works dealing with aeroplanes, animals (goats, monkeys, snakes, birds, tigers, dogs and so on) or mountains, and in the irreverent series on coins. They also appear, however, in the islands and woods that Marescalchi began painting in 2003-4.  In the last years of his activity his subjects also came to include chess, skulls, weapons and explosions.     

 

From the 1980s on Bobo worked in his studio in Via Toscanella in Florence. Then, in 2002, he moved to the studio in Borgo Albizi, a place that he loved, where he studied and painted up to the very last days of his life. He died in Florence on 5 December 2015.