The work of Italo Scanga over the past forty years is somewhat like lunch in Italy, just as you think you are finished yet another plate is brought forth more delicious and completely different from the last. His work asks that you not get comfortable with one kind of imagery or style. The work is not linear in its thinking, not continuous in its finished product, but does however contain the same elements. Whether they be painted by Scanga himself or appropriated, whether they are physical objects or renderings of them, one thread ties each of his many works together, that of memory and materials. To take one series of his work individually would be just as valid as to look at the whole. From photography to painting to sculpture, visual elements of his early childhood in Calabria, Italy are present as are his love of food, music and artists. To understand the work of Italo Scanga you must first understand his relationship to the work, his work is his life, and his life his work, they are as he once said all self- portraits with a universal statement. Scanga begins as most with the idea and from there the selection of material becomes the most integral part of the process. From the onset Scanga assesses its visual strength and contemplates his idea versus the material he has chosen to realize it. It has to feel right; the physical relationship to his work carries the needed momentum to finish it. Sometimes as he says it works and other times it doesn’t; there is a truth to him that has no pretense, his work is physical and bears all his emotion, it is humanitarian and empathetic.

Born in Lago, Calabria in 1932, Scanga spent his formative years in a Southern Italian Catholic culture, not to mention during World War II. At 15 he emigrated to America with his brother, leaving his two sisters, mother and father in Calabria. At 18 he worked on the GM assembly line until he was drafted into the war. He returned and on the GI bill went to study sculpture at Michigan State University, to become both an artist and a teacher. Scanga spent much of his early teaching career moving around and for some time set down here in Philadelphia, teaching sculpture at the Tyler School of Art. He now lives and teaches in La Jolla, Ca., but continues to keep strong ties to Philadelphia.

He is an artist who is greatly affected by his surroundings and history. When talking about what inspires his work he talks about his apprenticeship with a woodworker in his town of Lago as a child, of his fascination with musical composition and of nature, landscape, and architecture. He speaks of myth, folklore and the primitive. He admires the work of the Carracci and the Counter-Reformation movement and speaks of how strongly the emotion in these works is expressed in the gesture of the hands. He was quoted once as saying; " I go to Italy to get pregnant", this same quote comes up again and again in the many articles written about him. His ties to the country he left more than forty years ago still today remain an integral part of his character, his life and therefore his work. The ideas if you will are gathered and stored within him as he travels frequently to the land of his childhood, and upon his return they are born using the language of his hands, forming wood, gathering found materials and juxtaposing them with sometimes borrowed imagery. Whatever form the work takes on it still speaks of the same things. First to the experience and then to the physical material.

Scanga’s work is represented in Philadelphia by Larry Becker Contemporary Art, 43 N 2^nd Street, it has been since their beginning where not only will you find his work but also dear friends and former students in the owners Larry Becker and Heidi Nivling.