Nedo Merendi

Nedo Merendi was born in Faenza in 1957.

In the same town he took his diploma at the Public Art Institute for Ceramics  under the guide of Carlo Zauli, Augusto Betti, Alfonso Leoni e Gianna Boschi.

Most of all, this last one influenced his following work, mainteining a relation with the local tradition of the majolica object and the most cultured figurative decoration.

In 1980 he graduated at the Fine Arts Academy in Ravenna with the painter Umberto Folli, pupil of Giorgio Morandi.

Finally it’s essential to his formation a transversal and deep habitual reading of contemporary film, theatre and photographic  languages.

During those first years his ceramics is greatly pictorial and figurative, with clear Manneristic impressions, not devoid of ironic features.

He made small sets of unique decorated majolica objects, with unusual results of preciousness and elegance for that time, against the widespread  post-non-representational atmosphere that ruled the Faenza set in those years. 

From 1982 he started exhibiting with the group supported by Franco Solmi and Marilena Pasquali of “Nuova Ceramica”. Afterwards it followed International exhibitions put up by the International Museum of Faenza and those supervised by the Italian Institute of Tokyo Culture.

Later in Merendi ceramics comes out more and more the need of  the essentials and the impoverishment of  expressive means. 

The objects are simplified  with studied attentions to proportions and details of the minimalist sort.

The decorations become more and more abstract or still figurative, when they explain in a personal way botanical and naturalistic subjects.

In spite of his  more outsider position in the ceramics world,  he is granted of appreciations in that field, such as his one-man exhibition at the Ducal Palace of Urbania (1995) e that at the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza (2004).

His is the cover of the volume on the Italian Ceramics of the 1900s by Franco Bertoni for Electa (2005). 

In the last years painting is again the core of his work.

He was invited at the exhibition of the figurative painting of Romagna of 1900s at the S. Domenico Museums of Imola, supervised by F. Bertoni in 2014.