For the love of art
We remain active within the artistic community and are proud to be a member at The Chelsea Arts Club. Furthermore we provide financial support by way of Corporate Patronage to the Turner Contemporary Art Gallery in Margate and to the Tate as Tate Young Patrons. Our support helps them to: reach a younger and more diverse audience through learning programmes; conduct progressive research and dialogue, undertake art conservation projects and acquisitions and of course to display art within their respective public galleries, accessible to all.
Further support for the Arts
We continue to support various local arts organisations, the most recent being The Margate School of Art (TMS), an independent not for profit postgraduate liberal arts school in Margate. We also provide annual sponsorship to the Kent Architectural Students Association (KASA) in support of their summer end of year show celebrating final student outputs from their degrees at the Kent School of Architecture (KSA) in Canterbury.
Our DNA
Beside Architecture, we have an inherent passion and lifelong interest for the Arts; having been surrounded by it from a young age by our father Toni del Renzio [1915-2007]. Toni was one of the last leading British Surrealist artists of the 1930s and in 1938 met in Paris with Picasso and Andre Masson and associated with Benjamin Peret. He painted, produced collage and was a fervent poet. During the 1940s he taught art theory at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. From 1951 he served on the exhibitions committee at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) participating in the British wing of Pop Art: the Independent Group (IG) and contributed to the 1956 seminal art exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’. He held graphic design and fashion editor positions at the National Trade Press (1948), from 1956 Newnes and Pearson’s women’s magazine group, Flair, Topic and Harper’s Bazaar and in 1963 revamped Milanese magazine Novita as Vogue Italiana.
His extensive connections to artists, architects and designers saw him well placed to write regular articles, essays and reviews for English, Italian and American publications (Art Monthly, Time-Life, Architectural Review etc). During the 1960s he worked on film, scripts and documentaries and ventured into acting making an appearance on horseback in the spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). During 1968 he lectured on art and media in California at Berkley and Santa Cruz and witnessed the Hippie explosion in San Francisco recounting his experiences in his book ‘The Flower Children’. From 1969 he lectured in art, architecture, design and media at: Chelsea School of Art, the Courtauld Institute and Bath Academy of Art at Corsham and in 1975 became head of the Art History department at Canterbury College of Art until 1980. In later years he returned to Surrealist painting, collage and published Surrealist manifestos and polemical texts, his last publication being ‘Alter Ego and Doppelganger’ 2007.
