The exhibition, organized by Galleria Russo in collaboration with the Fausto Pirandello Association and with the Fausto Pirandello Foundation, sponsored by Roma Capitale Assessorato alla Crescita Cultura and curated by Fabio Benzi and Flavia Matitti, offers an extraordinary itinerary through the painter’s artistic production, from the intense works of the 1920s characterized by rich chromatic plasticity, to the bodies with the suffered carnality of the bathers, the countryside parched by the sun and the vibrant views of the rooftops of Rome rendered with a rough and at the same time sumptuous, to the still lifes of great intimist flavor.
Among the most significant works in the exhibition are also some historical paintings, such as Shepherds and Head of a doll, exhibited respectively at the II Quadriennale of Rome in 1935 and the III Quadriennale of Rome in 1939, and Large Bathers, exhibited at the 1962 Venice Biennale. More than eighty oil paintings and pastels will trace almost the entire activity of the artist (Pirandello died in 1975), in an exhibition itinerary that allows us to reconstruct the complex painter’s relationship with reality, pervaded by a sense of restlessness, expectation, awe and estrangement: an exceptional anthological exhibition dedicated to one of the most important protagonists of Italian painting of the 20th century.
The exhibition highlights the different stages of Pirandello’s artistic journey, highlighting his contribution to the evolution of pictorial language. After contributing, for example to the elaboration of the “tonalism” of the Roman School (which was to become the common heritage of the most innovative young painters of the 1930s), Pirandello “elaborated its material and visionary, spirited and disturbing, through spatulate figures, from everyday positions and gestures , but as if locked in rhythmic and unnatural compositions,” as Benzi writes.
