ArtistItalian
Guido Gambone
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At fifteen, Guido Gambone walked away from the gymnasium in Vietri sul Mare and into the ceramic workshop of Francesco Avallone. It was a choice that shaped everything that followed. Born in 1909 in Montella, near Avellino, he had moved as a boy with his family to Vietri, a coastal town whose kilns had produced everyday earthenware for centuries. The apprenticeship gave him the fundamentals; what he did with them was something else entirely.
Gambone developed his craft through the interwar decades, eventually taking over as director of the Industria Ceramica Salernitana and then establishing his own workshop, La Faenzarella, in Vietri together with his brother Remigio and Andrea D'Arienzo. The work he made there in the 1930s and 1940s drew on southern Italian folk traditions while pushing toward something more personal - forms that felt ancient and contemporary at once, glazes in earthy browns and yellows with passages of white that recalled both prehistoric cave marks and the gestural abstraction then emerging across Europe.
By 1947 his reputation was firm enough to win the Premio Faenza, one of the most closely watched awards in Italian ceramics, for a cup decorated with abstract ornaments. He showed that same year at the 8th Triennale di Milano, and in 1950 at the Venice Biennale. The early 1950s brought a significant shift: Gambone closed the Vietri studio and relocated to Florence, where he opened a new workshop, La Tirrena, under his own name. The Florentine period produced some of his most inventive work - stoneware vessels with incised figures, wall reliefs with compressed animal and plant forms, lamps and plates in which painting and sculpture seemed to merge.
Gambone won Honor Diplomas at the 1951 and 1954 Triennale exhibitions, and held a personal show at the 1957 edition. His work entered the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, and he donated 350 pieces to the Museo della Ceramica at Raito in Vietri sul Mare, making it a primary repository for his output from the southern period. La Tirrena closed in 1967; Gambone died two years later at sixty.
On the auction market, Gambone appears regularly at Italian and Scandinavian houses. Pandolfini Casa d'Aste in Florence accounts for the largest share of his appearances at Auctionist, followed by Bruun Rasmussen and Quittenbaum. Stoneware vases and wall reliefs are the most traded forms. Recorded sale prices in our database reach approximately 3,800 SEK for a salt-glazed vessel and 3,400 DKK for a square stoneware wall relief with incised floral motif.