Elvio Marchionni was born in Spello in January 1944. He attended the Bernardino Art Institute of Betto in Perugia where he studied medieval painting techniques. He began painting very early with an incessant experimentation of techniques to depict and represent the harmony of the inner person with the outer one that lives and fights in reality. Studies at the Academy and experiences with illustrious personalities of culture and of restoration and conservation of ancient paintings, lead his painting to an awareness of the past as essence and extension in the future.

Since the first exhibitions in the ’70s it is clear the study of the old masters to experience the matter worn by time and weather. Marchionni from the rough plaster extracts the figure, his idea of ​​beauty: symmetry, balance between masses, shapes, lines and colors. He studies the classics, the divine proportions of the great masters, he learns the art of the post-war period and the avant-gardes that came from America in the 60s. His conversation with the protagonists of pop art until the trans-avant-garde is evident even though he does not extremes with bright colors, everything is suffused, slight, but nevertheless undeniably present.

In the ’80s he exhibited in Paris, Madrid, California, Heidelberg. In 1990 he exhibited in Foggia, Belluno, Brindisi. In this period he moved to his new studio and in this space his relationship with “time” takes on particular connotation: the charm of the stones, the colors of lime and mold, the continuity of the memory of the past with the reality of the present find away in the construction of the floors.

In 1999 he became part of the Art’è group for which he illustrated books such as the stories and the florets of St. Francis, the Iliad, the Gospels, the Decameron and the Orlando Furioso. With the exhibition at the fortress of Vieste in 2004, aesthetic research returns to symbolism and to design. In Accadìa and in Foggia he exhibited in two exhibitions called “Strappi” using only the old plasters, torn in the abandoned houses of Umbria and the inland of Foggia. Also in this period he organizes the “Bottega d’Arte Opus” (Opus Art Workshop) where are formed new young artists, and he experiments with new techniques of three-dimensional representation approaching the sculpture of the bas-reliefs.

In 2006 he received from the Bishop of Foligno the task of decorating the apse of the church of Scopoli and of the Chapel of the Sacrament at the Cathedral of Foligno. In August 2009 another project materializes that Marchionni has long thought and elaborated, the creation of the Elvio Marchionni Foundation. In 2012 he exhibited in Terni and in February 2013 at Rocca Paolina in Perugia. In June 2013 he was asked by Mons. Fortunato Frezza, chaplain of the Vatican doctors, to continue the work of the artist Dina Bellotti, “the portraitist of the pontiffs” who died in 2003, making the portraits, in pencil and charcoal, of the popes Benedict XVI and Francis.