CONTEMPORARY ART
 

Before Dinner 1970

Oil on hardboard. Signature, date and title top right. Udo Toniato, a naive painter, is known for his works that tell the story of his homeland, the Bassa del Po, with its characters. Here he depicts three little priests who, armed with umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun of the Bassa, head towards the votive chapel on the country road, observed by an amused goat, for the last prayers of the day. The work is presented in a frame.

Abstract Composition

Oil painting on canvas. Signed lower right. The painter Gianni Frassati, born in Monza, lived and worked in Milan, from where he then exhibited his works throughout Italy and Europe. In his decidedly abstract pictorial production, the geometric dimension of the figures prevails, often developed with three-dimensional and optical effects. Work presented in a frame.

Man with Dog, 1962

Lithograph, numbered bottom left N.138/170, signed bottom right. Pisan painter and engraver, he achieved national recognition only when he became professor of engraving at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in 1948, under the chair of Giovanni Fattori. Viviani was able to transfer his personal vision of the world into his engravings, through images that drew on the life of the Pisan coast, the land he loved and where he lived, dedicating himself to his other great passion, hunting. Presented in a plexiglass frame.

Family Album 2001

Oil and acrylic on canvas. Signature, date and title on the back. Concetto Pozzati was an eclectic artist: after his debut in the Informal climate, the artist reworked the influences of international Pop Art in a personal key, always remaining linked to a simplified, ironic figuration, with surrealist atmospheres. The work presented belongs to the 2001 series of Family Albums, in which the artist portrays the faces of his family members: here the same artist appears, on the left, flanked by the childish faces of his two children, and in addition the head of a cockerel, in accordance with Pozzati's habit of adding elements of everyday life into his works.

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.

Figures, 1963

Inkwell on paper. Signed and dated '63 lower right. On the back there is an autographed declaration of authenticity dated "Milan 31-3-1980". Small drawing from the 1960s, in which Ennio Morlotti proposes the study for some nude figures, in which he has already overcome the Picasso phase and is moving towards an informal expressionism. The work is presented in a frame.

Untitled, 1961

Mixed media on paper and cardboard. Signed and dated '61 top right. The composition - because such are the works of the artist originally from Bari but lived in Paris - presents some objects from the world of toys (the two plastic bottles) assembled together with nails, painted tape, waxed paper, trimmings, on a based on paper and cardboard, to create an imaginative landscape, a sort of scenography for a childish world. The work is presented in a frame..

Nature's Poetry 1962

Mixed media, with metal applications on canvas. On the back there is the name of the artist, with the title and the date. James McClintock is an American artist who joined Post Painterly Abstraction, a movement that developed in America in the 60s and 70s which strongly claimed its descent from American Abstract Expressionism and the work of the action painters of the group by Pollock, cutting off all dependence on Europe starting in the 1940s. McClintock also worked in Europe, in particular in Florence where between 1961 and 1967 he worked in collaboration with the Galleria Numero di Fiamma Vigo, a non-conformist place created by the Argentine gallerist to present and promote innovative works. The work is presented in a frame.

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)

Gallipoli, 1989

Oil on canvas. Signature, date and title on the reverse. The painting of Salvatore Esposito, born in Gallipoli, evokes a reality transfigured by feeling, almost lyrical; his foreshortenings, full of light and colours, if at first they juxtapose the landscape with perspective views that are still naturalistic, then they settle on a formal synthesis that leads to a 'lyrical abstractionism'. The work is presented with a frame.

Untitled, 1998

Oil painting on canvas. Signed and dated lower right. Riccardo Licata, an eclectic artist who dedicated himself to painting, engraving, mosaic, sculpture and also scenography, has gone through various phases of artistic research and has been able to combine abstraction with a profound search for spatial rhythms marked by signs . His graphic-pictorial writing, inspired by music, has given a unique identity to his works, which stand out for the skilful use of symbols and graphic features. The work is presented in a frame.

Female Figure on Horseback

Oil on the table. Signed top right. Maurizio Goracci, aka Mago, is a Roman painter of figurative subjects. The work depicts a naked woman wrapped in a pink cloth, sitting on a grazing horse: MaGo's figures, although well defined, are always placed in a surreal background, shaded in ranges of acid colours, which gives a sense of the fantastic . The work is presented in a frame.

The Eye Rounds in Space 1968

Oil painting on canvas. Signed lower right. On the back there is the title, the date and a further signature to authenticate the work. Painter, poet and essayist, Virgilio Guidi always maintained a solitary, critical position and never one of absolute programmatic adhesion to the aesthetic dictates of the artistic movements and groups of the 20th century, even if he was always the bearer of significant personal contributions to new pictorial research . Starting from the 1940s, Guidi began to systematically develop the great cycles, with which he repeatedly investigated the same subject-composition nucleus, continuing to follow the common thread of all his art: light. His painting favored the choice of delicate tonal chords and the representation of figurative and landscape elements through abstract rhythms. This work belongs to the series created in the 1960s of " Tondi", with the subtitle "Eye in space". It is presented in a frame.

Sardines Fishing

Multiple bas-relief in silver. Signature engraved at the bottom. On the back, label of the "Alla Chiave" Gallery in Mestre, with the number of the specimen 140/200, and photo of the artist at work. Giuseppe Migneco, originally from Messina but who moved to Milan at a young age, was one of the major representatives, together with Aligi Sassu, Renato Birolli, Bruno Cassinari, Renato Guttuso, of the Corrente group open to the European artistic avant-garde. In favor of a painting of social commitment, he investigates reality with a critical, objective, historical eye. His characters with hard, square faces, marked by hard work and rendered with bright and strong tones, recall his Sicily with violent and clear features, but also the social realism of the Mexican muralists. In frame.

Untitled, 2004

Enamels on canvas. Signed and dated on the back. The pictorial work of the artist Roberto Coda Zabetta is the subject of some of the most complex and contradictory definitions of criticism: those who see pain, anger, fear, discomfort or those who see provocation, the dream, the unconscious. The artistic path of Roberto Coda Zabetta, who travels extensively around the world, is often characterized by the encounter with the culture and iconography of the countries he discovers, as well as by the sometimes dramatic events of which they are protagonists.

Valtellina, 2000

Mixed media on canvas. On the reverse there is signature, title, date and dedication to the art critic Rossana Bossaglia. The work belongs to the pictorial phase of the painter Massimo Soldati, which evolved after 1985 and characterized by the search for new expressive techniques and the use of different materials, moving from formal figurative to informal figurative and conceptual abstract. The work is presented in a frame.

Glimpse of the Country with Figures

Oil on wooden panel. Signed lower left. Vittore Antonio Cargnel, father of Lucio Cargnel, was mainly a landscape painter, author in particular of evocative views of Treviso and exciting glimpses of Friuli, his homeland. He is considered the spokesperson of intimate landscape painting, for his ability to freeze landscapes in the immediacy of atmospheric changes, often on small panels, so as not to miss the moment of a particular luministic condition responsible for the impression aroused in the artist. In this part of the town, the luminous contrast stands out between the square still dominated by the gray rain, highlighted by the umbrellas of passers-by - figures that are only indistinct spots, neutral elements of the landscape - and the light which, cutting through the clouds, illuminates and colours. the top of the buildings. The painting is presented in a contemporary 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.

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.