Carlo Zinelli was born in 1916 near Verona, Italy. His mother died when he was two, and at nine his father sent him to work as a farmhand. As a youth he moved to Verona, where he worked in a slaughterhouse, and began taking an interest in music, painting, and dance. First signs of mental trouble began to show following his military service-in 1939 in the Spanish Civil War, and later-in World War II. In 1947 Zinelli was diagnosed as a schizophrenic suffering from a severe communication problem, and was interned in a psychiatric clinic in Verona. His disordered verbal speech deteriorated to the point of voicing only a few sounds or unidentif iable voices blended with excerpts from opera and folk songs, leftovers from his great love of music.

- The discovery -
In 1955 Carlo Zinelli began painting on the outer walls of the psychiatric
clinic to which he was committed, scorching them with his f ingernails or
with a brick. Two years later, in 1957, the "Studio for Artistic Expression" was set up in the hospital, and Zinelli spent most of the next 14 years there, creating his entire oeuvre.

- The work -
Zinelli left behind a body of work spanning some 3,000 paintings, most
of them executed on both sides of the sheet in pastel, gouache, and
ink. The images are associated with his past: animals, farmhouses and
f igures, soldiers and vehicles, as well as fragmentary writing. The
repetitious rhythm of the images, their arrangement on the paper, and their interrelations call to mind musical structures. The use of letters and
illegible lingual signs ref lects the communication limitations suffered by
Zinelli, attesting to a closed, private world, compressed and oppressive.