Born: 1942, Campi Bisenzio, Tuscany, Italy

Currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada and Florence, Italy

The most poignant and enduring of Sassone’s influences can be traced back to his studies in the 1960’s with painter Silvio Loffredo, a student of the Austrian master, Oskar Kokoschka. The vigorous brushstrokes and vibrant colors appealed to Sassone, offering the artist a foundation that has remained throughout his career. In 1967, after the great flood of Florence, he moved to California.

Sassone established himself on the American art scene in the late 70s, challenging the mainstream and forging an individual path with a vision and style of painting distinctly his own. In 1981 Sassone relocates to San Francisco. He plunges into the world of the homeless producing a remarkable body of work in which he gave moving expression to his own sense of identification with exiles of all kinds. A number of these works were exhibited for the first time at Art Expo Chicago and Art Basel in Switzerland.

Marco Sassone gained international recognition for his groundbreaking exhibition Home on the Streets that opened in San Francisco in 1994 and travelled to Los Angeles, Florence and Toronto.

Known for a heightened sense of color and his powerfully expressive gestural style, his body of work encompasses a wide spectrum of subjects, including urban landscapes, portraits and natural environments. His current series of railroad track paintings lead the artist further into a dramatic engagement with his past, yet also offering the prospect of moving forward in his current life, symbolic theme of his artistic journey. In an era of mass reproduction and the digital exploitation of imagery, his subjects express the tension between conventional forms and contemporary relevance, thus inviting interpretation in a classical as well as a modern perspective.

The artist’s paintings, drawings and prints have been the subject of many exhibitions, including those at National Academy of Design, New York (1977); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (1988); Berheim-Jeune, Paris (1988); Cloisters of Santa Croce, Florence (1997); Pietrasanta Museum, Pietrasanta, Italy (2003); San Angelo Museum of Fine Art, Texas (2014); Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto (2016); Columbus Centre, Toronto (2019). His paintings hang in numerous international public and private collections.

Significant among the numerous books and catalogues that have been published about the artist’s work is the monograph Sassone by art historian Donelson F. Hoopes. The artist’s autobiography, American Journey: My Life in Art was released in March 2023.