Paolo Serra - folder with 10 screen prints by Paolo Serra

Paolo Serra was born in Morciano di Romagna in 1946. The son of a shoe designer who worked from a small shop in the centre of Rimini, Serra's skill in craftsmanship was innate. In 1955, Serra moved with his parents to Northampton in England, where he lived for twenty-seven years.
Serra credits his burgeoning artistic career to a primary school teacher who fostered his appreciation of Italian art, particularly that of the Trecento. This led to a compulsion to visit museums and galleries, with two exhibitions making a particular impression on him: Picasso at London's Tate Gallery in 1960 and Art Alive, an exhibition of European contemporary art held in Northampton the following year.
In 1962, when Serra was not yet 16, the Century Gallery in Northampton held his first solo exhibition, which was widely reviewed by The Guardian newspaper. In the years that followed he won a number of grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain, which also purchased one of his works. After contributing to several group shows following his first solo exhibition, he put painting aside to concentrate on unconventional materials such as Plexiglas, with which he produced assemblages and artefacts that he called 'constructions'. Around 1969 he became deeply interested in the painting of the Old Masters again, an interest he cultivated assiduously through frequent visits to the National Gallery in London. From then on, partly as a result of his discovery of Cennino Cennini's seminal treatise,