The exhibition, organized by the Russo Gallery in collaboration with the Fausto Pirandello Association and the Fausto Pirandello Foundation, sponsored by the Roma Capitale Department of Cultural Growth and curated by Fabio Benzi and Flavia Matitti, offers an extraordinary itinerary in the painter’s artistic production, from intense works of the 1920s characterized by the rich chromatic plasticity, up to the bodies of the suffering carnality of the bathers, from the sun-baked countryside and the vibrant views of the roofs of Rome rendered with a rough and at the same time sumptuous material, to the still lifes of great intimate flavor.
Among the most significant works on display are some historical paintings, such as Shepherds and Doll’s Head, exhibited respectively at the II Quadriennale di Roma in 1935 and the III Quadriennale di Roma in 1939, and the Grandi bagnanti, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1962.
Over eighty paintings in oil and pastels will retrace almost the entire activity of the artist (Pirandello dies in 1975), in an exhibition that allows us to reconstruct the painter’s complex relationship with reality, pervaded by a sense of restlessness, of expectation. , of amazement and estrangement: an exceptional anthology dedicated to one of the most important protagonists of Italian painting of the twentieth century.
The exhibition highlights the different stages of Pirandello’s artistic career, highlighting his contribution to the evolution of the pictorial language. After having contributed, for example, to the elaboration of the “tonalism” of the Roman School (which will become the common heritage of the most innovative young painters of the 1930s), Pirandello “elaborated the material and visionary solution, spirited and disturbing, through spatulated figures, from and everyday gestures, but as if stuck in rhythmic and unnatural compositions ”, as Benzi writes.