On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Gino Severini (Cortona, 1883 – Paris, 1966), Galleria Russo presents the in-depth retrospective Gino Severini. Diario di una vita, a major exhibition project dedicated to one of the most cosmopolitan and profoundly European protagonists of twentieth-century art.
Curated by Daniela Fonti, author of the Catalogo ragionato of Gino Severini, scientific director with Francesco Tetro of the Archive of the Works of Duilio Cambellotti and president of the Fondazione Carlo Levi, the exhibition is distinguished by a particularly compelling curatorial approach: the sixty works on display transform each phase of the artist’s career into a chapter of his artistic “diary.”
The exhibition unfolds as a true visual narrative—a diary composed of heterogeneous elements: working notes on paper, sketches, preparatory studies, finished drawings, important paintings on canvas, and sculptures—while maintaining strong intellectual and poetic coherence. The result is a remarkable journey marked by a wide variety of techniques, languages, and approaches, restoring the complexity of a research path pursued with absolute intellectual freedom.
An artist, theorist, and tireless experimenter, Severini was for over sixty years a central figure on the international art scene, distinguishing himself as a genuine “man of dialogue”: between individuals and languages, between the avant-garde and tradition, between figuration and abstraction, between theoretical rigor and intuitive impulse. He boldly traversed Italian Futurism and Cubism, through the “return to order” and the neo-Cubist research of the postwar period, consistently demonstrating an unceasing drive toward renewal, never satisfied with established formulas.
