Francesco Tabusso was born in 1930 in San Giovanni (Milan), where his family of Piedmontese origins moved for a short period following his engineer father.
The pictorial inclination manifested itself early, starting from the years of war and displacement in Rubiana, when he moved with his family in the country house in Val di Susa, he begins to focus, in contact with the peasant world, his poetic imagination. A theme of rural inspiration animated by a fervent imagination, to which he will be able to combine a rigorous discipline under the guidance of Felice Casorati, of whom he is a student, after classical high school diploma, from 1949 to 1954. 1954 is the year of the debut exhibition and first participation in the Venice Biennale. In short the artist is invited to the main national and international exhibitions, receiving numerous awards. From 1963 to 1984 he combined his activity with painting teaching: he teaches Ornato drawn at the Bergamo Art School, therefore Figure drawn at the Albertina Academy High School in Turin. Choosing as his subject a rural world of popular inspiration, from the beginning he manifests an authentic “vocation to storytelling”, which will lead him to happy collaborations with some of the most famous names in Italian literature of the 20th century, such as Piero Chiara, Dino Buzzati, Mario Soldati, Mario Rigoni Stern. 1963 represents a turning point in the painter’s career at the time thirty-three year old: the solo show dedicated to him in March by Ettore Gian Ferrari constitutes the beginning of a fortunate partnership. Tabusso signs a contract of exclusivity with the prestigious Milanese gallery which will take care of the activity for approximately thirty years, organizing more than sixty personal exhibitions of the author in those years in Italy and abroad. By virtue of an art he has always had celebrated man and nature with immediacy and expressive force – with the gift of “simplicity” -, he was called to create in 1975, for the Church of San Francesco al Fopponino in Milan designed by Gio Ponti, the monumental altarpiece Il Cantico delle Creature (96 m2 of painting) and subsequently the eight triptychs with the stories of the Saint.
The critical and public success achieved during the numerous solo exhibitions will remain constant, dedicated not only to the happy dialogue with the art of the past, but also to the development of suggestions from popular and cultured literature. In the first half of the nineties, Tabusso attempted various works of a religious nature: in addition to the votive pillars located along ancient transit and pilgrimage routes in Val di Susa, he frescoed the presbytery of the sanctuary of the Madonna della Bassa in Mompellato (fraction of Rubiana) , an intervention created with Germana Albertone and depicting the story of the valley resident Nicol Lorenzo.
Tabusso died in Turin in 2012 after approximately sixty years of tireless artistic activity.