ArtistItalian
Gino Manca
3 active items
Gino Manca was born on 4 June 1920 in Sardinia, the large Mediterranean island that has produced a notable number of sculptors - among them Costantino Nivola - whose formation began within Italian folk and craft traditions before moving into the orbit of modern European academies. Manca trained at the academy in Milan, the principal school in northern Italy for professional sculptors, where he would have worked in the Italian figurative tradition that still dominated academic instruction in the interwar and early postwar decades.
His path out of Italy came through a commission. In 1955 he traveled to Norway for an artistic project connected to the fiftieth anniversary of King Haakon VII's reign - a royal jubilee that generated demand for commemorative and decorative work across Scandinavia. That commission planted him in the Nordic world and he never fully returned. After a decade in Norway, he moved to Sweden in 1965, settling first in Ödeshög in Östergötland and then relocating to Norrköping in 1966, where he remained until his death on 7 January 1985 at the age of 64.
Manca worked across a range of sculptural registers and materials throughout his career. His earlier work - particularly the plaster and ceramic pieces dateable to the late 1950s and early 1960s - includes portrait busts and figurines in a competent academic idiom. Signed ceramic works from 1960 and 1961 survive in Swedish collections, as do patinated plaster pieces from 1959, suggesting an active studio practice during the years immediately following his arrival in the country.
But Manca is perhaps best known today through the objects that reached the widest audience: the mould-cast concrete and artificial stone sculptures he produced for the garden-art trade. These included deer, bears, eagles, garden fountains, figures from Nordic folklore such as Nils Holgersson with his goose, and interpretations of famous works including a version of "The Little Mermaid." He created the moulds and sold production rights to garden dealers, meaning that his signed or attributed pieces proliferated across Swedish and Scandinavian gardens from the late 1960s onward. He also produced plaster portrait busts - particularly busts of Black women and men in an exoticising mid-century register - that became very common decorative objects in Swedish homes during the 1960s. Some gnome and troll figures were made on commission for the German factory Heissner in Lauterbach, extending his commercial reach further.
This industrial dimension of his practice - the deliberate multiplication of forms through casting and trade distribution - is what distinguishes Manca from purely studio-based sculptors. His work existed at the intersection of fine art training and applied commercial production, a position that was common among immigrant craftsmen-sculptors working in postwar Northern Europe.
On Auctionist, Gino Manca's 20 recorded lots are predominantly garden sculptures and figurines, appearing at regional Swedish auction houses including Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, Södermanlands Auktionsverk, and Halmstads Auktionskammare. Realised prices have ranged from 300 SEK to 1,008 SEK, with concrete deer and garden ornaments forming the bulk of lots offered. Four items remain active at the time of writing. The relatively modest price levels reflect the objects' origins as multiples, though signed and dated studio pieces command more attention from collectors tracking postwar Italian emigrant craft.