Simbari Sylvie

Italian painter Nicola Simbari used vivid color to convey the beauty and richness of life. His figurative paintings and drawings were often set in serene Mediterranean landscapes, giving them a romantic quality. Simbari had a distinctive contemporary and expressionist style characterized by broad strokes of saturated pastels, creating scenes that seemed to be soaked in sunlight.

Simbari was born in 1927 in Calabria, Italy, a region known for its stunning sea vistas. When he was three years old, his family moved to Rome, where his father worked as an architect at the Vatican. Surrounded and enthralled by the city’s cultural masterpieces, Simbari decided to pursue art. He studied painting and architecture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and opened his studio when he was 22 years old.

In 1953, Simbari held his first solo show in Rome and won a best stage design award for the musical Tarantella Napoletana. In 1958, he had a solo show in London and a mural commission for the Italian Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair.

Simbari never stopped growing as an artist. He experimented with many styles throughout his career and constantly pursued new colors to expand his range as a painter. When he died in 2012, Simbari was considered one of Italy’s greatest living artists.

Today, Simbari’s work is held in both private and public collections across the globe, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Liberty Company, the Christian Dior Collection, the Bank of Tokyo, the University of Cincinnati Fine Arts Department, the Exxon Corporation and the Tulsa Bank of Commerce.

Simbari’s paintings continue to resonate with viewers. In 2021, Findlay Galleries in Palm Beach, Florida, presented “Mediterraneo,” an exhibition of his landscapes and figurative works.

On 1stDibs, find Nicola Simbari prints, paintings, watercolors and more.

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

Find fine art prints for sale on 1stDibs today.