Pencil on paper. Signed on the back. The drawing is registered in the Fausto Melotti Archive, with code DIS 72006. Fausto Melotti was a multifaceted and very prolific artist and it is almost impossible to link his production to a particular technique or theme, without providing only a partial view of his vision artistic. The salient features that are constant in Melotti are geometry, the study of abstraction, which leads him to use realistic but not scientifically accurate elements, and arranging the elements so that they recall a musical rhythm, a detail that refers to his training as a musician Sculptor, painter, musician, poet, he made numerous design drawings for his works. Drawing represented for him a fundamental exercise, to transfuse the original graphic trait from sheets of paper into sculptures and ceramics. The sculptures for which he is best known are made up of geometric elements made with metals (brass, iron and gold) worked into thin filaments, giving life to ethereal, weightless and almost fragile compositions. The work is presented in a frame.

The Woodcutter 1980

Oil on glass. On the lower left are the signature and date, accompanied by the artist's symbol, the stylised figurine of a man in a wheelchair. This is a work on glass by the painter Mario Previ, who has lived and painted in a wheelchair since the age of eighteen, due to quadriplegia following a plunge into his Taro river. He said of himself: ‘The world, the passage of time, from this point of view (the wheelchair) teaches you many things. You learn to wake up every morning with a purpose, even if your body is in pain, if every gesture generates suffering and you depend on others, and giving up could be an easy solution. And instead, art, painting, together with the serenity of my world, of friends, give me incredible energy. They have saved me, giving me the strength to live'. In 1974, three years after the accident, inspired by a television programme on Yugoslavian naïve painters, in particular by the works on glass by Mijo Kovacic, Previ began painting and learning the art of glass painting as a self-taught artist, until he became known and appreciated for his paintings. In his naifs, Mario Previ recounts a reality that has almost disappeared, real stories albeit in a fairy-tale tone, revives lost traditions, glimpses of life that belonged to other generations, those of the peasant civilisation (from which he comes), but what emerges most from his visions are the ‘forë’, those that could once be heard in the ‘firossi’, the traditional evenings in the hamlets of Parma dedicated to getting together to tell anecdotes, stories and historical curiosities, often in front of the fireplace, when it was cold and snowing outside. The work is presented in the frame.

Mixed media on paper. On the back the artist's stamp with the signature, the title (not deciphered) and the date of the work. Caccioni, an artist who was born, trained and still lives in Bologna, is one of the protagonists of a generation that has now reached a definitive linguistic maturation and occupies an important space within the contemporary artistic panorama. His research mainly uses unusual materials such as acetates, PVC and, more recently, scenic backdrops from nineteenth-century theatrical works, on which he intervenes by painting forms taken from a personal memory and from suggestions coming from different cultures and historical periods. A recurring element in Luca Caccioni's work is writing, a self-significant sign that designs the work and is capable of narrating thoughts; working by superposition, the images are constructed by addition or subtraction of color on the various supports. Work in frame.

Female Face 2001

Oil painting on canvas. Dated and signed on the back. Born in Seregno, Danilo Martinis was trained with Osvaldo Minotti. Painter and designer, he has furnished prestigious residences all over the world, his works are particularly appreciated in the United Arab Emirates and in Russia. He loves to express his thoughts through graphic-figurative images rendered through geometric effects and chromatic games, using mainly female figures as interpreters. In this work he proposes a close-up of a female face, enhancing its expressiveness through the play of colors in the ranges of yellow.

Oil on plywood

Charles Moody (1979), oil on plywood. Signed on the back. The work was exhibited at the solo exhibition "Borderland" at the Gallery 8 in Milan Corso Venezia, as evidenced by the paper to the back lable. Charles Moody graduated in 2003 at the Art Institute of Boston and, after three years in Milan, chooses to live in New York. In his art the focus at trial (conceptual art, process art) rather than to the image content and it is in this scrap that painting is at its best. An art that was created by the approval of television images (almost never films) and in particular from popular soap operas. Moody's work goes beyond the mass media image by customizing the selection for special images that, in his view, offer a potential narrative; are images of transition, moments of transition from one scene to the next. The artist uses a manual oil painting to reproduce the low quality of the tv picture extolling the "blurring" of blur. We are facing a loss of spatial dimension, in a temporality confused-diffuse-intangible which is difficult to recognize the boundaries ("Borderland"). In these perceptual distortions, in which time dilates expands, each painting represents a "indiscernibilità" in which the recognition of the object that takes second place. The time of Moody is neither Chronicle nor history but suspension. (From "Charles Moody, Borderland", curated by Gianni Romano, exhibition catalogue, CorsoVeneziaOtto, November-December 2009)

Studio 1992

Mixed media on paper. Signed and dated lower, with title. On the back the artist's stamp with the signature, title and date of the work. Caccioni, an artist who was born, trained and still lives in Bologna, is one of the protagonists of a generation that has now reached a definitive linguistic maturation and occupies an important space within the contemporary artistic panorama. His research mainly uses unusual materials such as acetates, PVC and, more recently, scenic backdrops from nineteenth-century theatrical works, on which he intervenes by painting forms taken from a personal memory and from suggestions coming from different cultures and historical periods. A recurring element in Luca Caccioni's work is writing, a self-significant sign that designs the work and is capable of narrating thoughts; working by superposition, the images are constructed by addition or subtraction of color on the various supports. Work in frame.

Sculpture - volume

Volume sculpture in bas-relief, consisting of rings and other metal shapes mounted on a metal panel. In frame.

Saint George 1992

Oil on panel. Signed bottom right. On the back, with Cyrillic characters, there is the title, the date and the location, Bergamo. The Lithuanian artist, who currently lives and works between Moscow, Italy and the United Kingdom, is considered one of the most important contemporary Russian artists. In his large production there are landscapes, still lifes, many portraits of famous people and his surreal compositions, an expression of his peculiar "dream vision" of reality. Even in this table, albeit in the style of traditional icons, the depiction of the famous St. George is proposed in a surreal key that reminds of De Chirico, in which the dragon is replaced by a goose, the Saint's head is an egg, in the outlines there are figures of sorceresses... a clearly unorthodox interpretation! The panel has a vertical slit. The piece is presented in a frame.

Composition on 4 Panels, 1978

Mixed media on canvas applied to wooden panels, showing a sequence. On the lower right the artist's initials GB and the numbering of the panels; on the verso of each panel is the signature in full, with the date and the following sequential titles: 'By Bosch', 'Declination of an Owl', 'Transcription' and 'Disappearance for Coquetry'. Gabriella Benedini has defined her as an artist as 'a nomad in search of the profound meaning of things'. Although attracted and interested first by abstract-informal painting, then by Existential Realism and then by the New Figuration, Gabriella Benedini proceeds on a strictly personal quest that cannot be assimilated into any specific current. The entire 1970s were mainly marked by pictorial works that reflected literary cues filtered through her need for growth and confrontation. Then, through her passion for Alchemy, Benedini began to transform anything that came her way into works of art; shells, pages of old books, bottles, everything is combined into a harmonious whole that recalls spaces. Her works therefore become mainly three-dimensional, either to hang on the wall, or they are sculptures, even large ones. The four panels are presented here in a single frame.

Sestante 14 1989

Color screenprint on paper. Signed in pencil lower right, numbered n. IV/XV bottom left. It is accompanied by photo authentication from the "Il borghetto" art house in Milan. The work was part of the "Sestante" series, consisting of 16 different serigraphs. In 1982 Alberto Burri created Sestante, a large cycle of seventeen cellotexes and an iron sculpture, which was exhibited from May to September of the following year in the space of the former Giudecca shipyards in Venice. The evocation of the old nautical instrument, which was used by travelers to establish the position of a given point with respect to the horizon, is a tribute to the maritime destiny of Venice. The paintings are Burri's umpteenth challenge: in their combinations the shapes and colors of the "sextant" create an inexhaustible cycle where there is not the slightest repetition. Within the same painting, or in the juxtaposition of one to the other, the kaleidoscope of shapes allows square and curvilinear structures to coexist, together with large chromatic backgrounds and dense visual patterns. In 1989 the artist proposed the cycle again as a graphic work, creating the "Sestante" series. The art historian Bruno Corà said that "in Burri's case, speaking of graphics does not mean speaking of a lesser production compared to paintings, but only of a different and parallel artistic modality, in conception and execution, in short such as to be able to be included with absolute importance in the production of the great painter, alongside all his other revolutionary innovative pronouncements". The work is presented in a frame.

Tableau doré

Mixed technique on plywood (painting and silver paper sheets). On the back, authentic with stamp and signature of the artist's sister. The work belongs to the series of Tableaux dorés, works created by the Milanese artist Remo Bianco starting from the 1950s. Born and educated in Milan, Remo Bianco was a pupil of De Pisis, in whose studio he frequented the great Italian artists of the twentieth century (Carrà, Sironi, Savinio, Soffici, Soldati, Marini, Cantatore). After the interlude of the war (enlisted, sank with his ship and was taken prisoner in Tunis), he resumed his artistic activity in Milan, participating in the Nuclear Movement and Spatialism, coming to completely detach himself from figurative painting to create works made of brushstrokes mashed potato. At the beginning of the fifties he began to create works, pictorial and sculptural, with different materials and to experiment with different themes and techniques; to this production belong the Tableaux dorés, composed of silvered or gilded aluminum foils on painted bases. The work is presented in a frame.

Urba Flower 2016

Mixed media: on painted wood fabric flower in a geometric field. Signed and dated on the back. The artist says of himself: "It is the great love for art that pushed me to make concrete emotions and colourful visions that have always lived in my lively imagination. Suggestions that derive from various pictorial influences that I have revisited in a personal interpretation".

Duck Flight

Bronze sculpture. Signature engraved on the base. Gino Masciarelli, a sculptor originally from Abruzzo but who lived in the Milan area, after having also worked at the Experimental Center for Scientific Research “F. Marinotti” in Lombardy, dealing with high-frequency cinematographic shooting, learned to capture the instability of bodies in movement and the dissolution of matter in space in many of his works. In the sculptures "Human groups" and "Flight" - to which the work presented here belongs -, the dynamism of flight can be observed almost as if it were a photographic sequence. The artist himself said: "Only 8 seconds made an impression on 300 meters of film, the aim was to slow down what the human eye cannot see, I wanted to capture the movement and the projection of these seconds lasted a couple of hours".

Panel in copper and brass, worked with irregular geometric figures. Mounted on a white lacquered wooden panel. Inspired by the works of the sculptor and painter Lino Bersani (Genoa 1935).

Figure in Rest 1969

Pen on paper. Signed lower right. Accompanied by photo authentication from the Mario Tozzi Archive. In Maestro Tozzi's extensive production there are many drawings, such as this one presented here, made with different techniques (ink, pastel, pencil, sanguine), dedicated to the human figure: in his dry and stylized style, Mario Tozzi outlines stylized, refined figurines in their silent and discreet geometry, favored by the absence of color, which brings out the forms on the white paper. Even in his pictorial production, Mario Tozzi's favorite subjects are, classically, figures and still lifes, but both figures and death are a set of solid geometric elements, the sphere, the cylinder, the cone, etc. The bodies are elementary, essential in the lines and details, powerful, statuesque, composed of just modeled solids, while the still lifes are a celebration of Euclidean geometry such as the jugs, bowls, flasks which are paradigms of volume and geometric rigor . Mario Tozzi's compositions are influenced by Cubism for certain cuts, by Metaphysics for certain architectural insertions and by Abstractism for the insertion of geometric figures. The work is presented in a frame.

Female Figure, 1977

Mixed technique on paper. Signed lower right. On the back, the artist's autograph dedication, with the date. Liberatore uses different pictorial techniques, favoring human figures, in particular female figures or smoking trains departing in mysterious stations. His images of women are depicted with sensual faces and attitudes and often framed by particular hats. Critics have defined Fausto Maria Liberatore's painting as art made of realism and mystery. The work is presented in a frame.

Plato and Aristotle

Mixed media on canvas. Signature, title, date and dedication on the reverse. Paolo Baratella, a recently deceased artist from Ferrara, developed his art by composing vast pictorial cycles inspired by contemporary subjects; we therefore have series of works by him gathered under significant titles. From the mid-1980s and into the 2000s, his scenographic apparatuses became more enriched with cultural, pictorial and literal iconographic references. In particular, Baratella pays greater attention to the iconography of art, philosophy and history. In this work the artist presents the portraits of the two great Greek philosophers (taken from their traditional classical depictions) and shades them in a frame of pink-blue colours. The two individual canvases are placed side by side inside a worked wooden frame, on whose two horizontal crosspieces the words "Timaeus" a work written by Plato, and "Ethics", a recurring theme of Aristotelian philosophy, are engraved.

Pair of Ink Drawings

Ink on paper. One of the two is signed on the lower right. The works of the Russian artist Vyacheslav Sawich Mikhailov are exhibited in prestigious museums such as the Tretyakov Gallery or the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, the National Museum of Russian Art, the Museum of Nonconformist Art in St. Petersburg. Considered an expressionist author, he creates scenes of intense drama with different techniques. The design proposed here is part of a series of scenes full of dramatically intertwined figures in contortions of the body, with allegorical elements and patches of often red color, evoking blood. In frame.