The Medical Herb Seller

Oil on canvas. West Africa. The naive-style painting depicts a woman selling medicinal herbs, holding a sign indicating the ailments she cures. These types of paintings, often used as advertisements for market stalls, reference traditional African values of motherhood, fertility, and prosperity, but transposed into a contemporary cultural context.

People at the Bar

Oil on canvas. Signed lower left. A signed declaration of authenticity is on the back. Influenced by Expressionism during his Parisian years, Fantuzzi placed a strong emphasis on the expression of emotions and moods in his works. Color dominates his canvases, typically in cool tones of blue, green, and purple, creating sometimes violent contrasts. Fantuzzi's main themes are the loneliness of the metropolis and the difficulty of communicating in interpersonal relationships; he often paints poorly defined figures and eyeless faces. Framed.

Untitled, 1992

Mixed technique on paper. Signed lower center. The artist's stamp with the signature and date of the work is on the back. Caccioni, an artist born, trained, and still lives in Bologna, is one of the protagonists of a generation that has now reached a definitive linguistic maturity and occupies a prominent place within the contemporary art scene. His research primarily utilizes unusual materials such as acetates, PVC, and, more recently, stage backdrops from 19th-century plays, upon which he paints forms drawn from personal memory and influences from diverse cultures and historical periods. A recurring element in Luca Caccioni's work is writing, a self-signifying sign that shapes the work and is capable of expressing thoughts; working through superimposition, the images are constructed by adding or subtracting color across various supports. Framed.

Sole Produttore

Silkscreen, applied to a metal plate. Signed lower right, titled at the bottom. Edition 446/500. The sun has been a theme dear to Giò Pomodoro since the 1950s, a theme the artist never abandoned, developing it particularly from the second half of the 1970s until a few years before his death, when, in 2000, he donated a monumental white marble sun to the City of Genoa, located right at the mouth of the harbor, on the Ponte dei Mille. The Producing Sun is a metaphorical representation of society's equitable exploitation of the sun's generative power. Passionate about astronomy, geometry, and poetry, Gio's Pomodoro has always been fascinated by the vital and symbolic potential of the image of the star. In these works, the artist represents it through a stylized circular shape, which is broken to accentuate the potential of elementary geometric forms (the circle, the square, the triangle) to open up to different dynamic tensions. Around these basic shapes, Pomodoro then inserts writings consisting of words that refer to referential concepts, such as real, possible, collective—in this case: "It moves, turns, builds a common harvest"—combined with other inscribed shapes that indicate physical structures, such as the hinge, the wheel, and the seed.

Bull

Watercolor and charcoal on paper. Signed lower right. The work is accompanied by a photo certificate from the Luciano Minguzzi Museum Foundation. A sculptor, engraver, and medallist, Minguzzi also created numerous drawings, often sketches for sculptures. The drawing is presented in a frame.

Sketches for Aida

Mixed media on paper. Seven signed and dated sketches, and, at the top, a reproduction of the artist's signature. These are works by the prominent Italian painter Remo Brindisi, whose painting, based on a descriptive and realistic approach in his early works, added expressionist nuances in his later works, giving rise to his own neo-figurative language. His work is always imbued with social and political intentions. Brindisi also worked as a sculptor, illustrator, writer, set designer, and cultural curator. From a private collection in Milan. His collaboration on the grandiose sets and costumes for the 1974 production of Aida at the Verona Arena was particularly noteworthy. A series of seven signed and dated sketches from this work is presented here. Framed

Multiplo in Feltro 1974

Collage of felt fragments on panel. Signed and dated on the back, with serial number no. 28/75. Dorazio paints abstract-geometric paintings, developing various forms over the years: after an initial production of monochromatic works, he introduced color in the early 1960s, creating geometric compositions on large, free-form patterns, with layers of flat colors. From the second half of the 1960s, he worked on dynamic formal situations enclosed in horizontal grids; from the 1970s, he thickened the texture with minimal, still horizontal, lines of color and line, using various materials. Framed.

The Man in the Kitchen

Mixed media on paper. Signed lower center. The renowned Russian set designer, painter, and illustrator Nicola Benois, who was the chief set designer at Milan's Teatro Alla Scala from 1935, contributed some of his drawings in 1977 to illustrate Francesco de' Rogati's book,"La cucina dell' uomo solo" (SM editore, 1977). Presented here is an original drawing, which was later used as an illustration for the text, printed in a smaller format. Framed.

Sketches for "Aida" 1974

Charcoal on paper. Signed and dated lower right, with the name of the sitter (for Amneris). Accompanied by a photo-certificate from the General Catalogue and Archive of the artist's works. This work is by the prominent Italian painter Remo Brindisi, whose painting, based on a descriptive and realistic approach in his early works, added expressionist nuances in his later works, giving rise to his own neo-figurative language. His work is always imbued with social and political intentions. Brindisi also worked as a sculptor, illustrator, writer, set designer, and cultural curator. His collaboration on the grandiose sets and costumes for the 1974 production of Aida at the Verona Arena was particularly noteworthy; a sketch for Princess Amneris is presented here. The work is presented in a frame.

Composition, 1933

Oil on canvas. Signed and dated lower right. Partial label of the Galleria Pesaro in Milan on the back. The work belongs to the first period of the French artist ORAZI (a name he wanted written in capital letters), a period still linked to figurative painting, influenced by the historical avant-gardes, in particular by post-impressionism; already in this first phase, research on color has a dominant place in the representation of characters and objects. In this composition, the red and blue colors of the books, the bottle label, the feather, stand out against the soft and homogeneous colors of the other objects, among which the stone mask dominates the left hemifield. The work comes from the artist's family of origin. It is presented in a period frame.

Scene with Figures, 1950 ca.

Oil on canvas. It belongs to a group of works called Jeux de Symboles, created from 1945 to 1950 approximately, in which ORAZI's painting moves towards the production of the so-called Peinture du Mouvement, characterized by the work on the dynamic effects of the human body (and animals) in motion, emphasized by the strength of color. Color dominates this scene, strong, acid, bright color, which outlines almost geometric human and animal figures, with marked and clear contours, in which two different ethnic groups seem to be recognized in comparison. The canvas has small losses of color. It comes from the artist's family collection.

The Shawl Portrait of a Mexican Woman ca. 1950

Oil on canvas. Signed lower right. The French painter ORAZI stayed in Mexico in 1955 and then in 1956-57, which was an exceptionally attractive world for intellectuals and artists of the time. The natural scenery, the customs and traditions of the local population were the themes that converged in the series of paintings called Peintures sur le Mexique, landscapes, compositions and portraits without giving in to the taste for the exotic, with an extremely careful work on the color to represent, without descriptivism, the elements of nature and the figures of men and women, already projected towards abstraction. This pictorial series, composed of 35 pieces, was then exhibited in 1957, upon his return to France, at the Vendôme Gallery in Paris. The painting comes from the private collection of the artist's family.

Burnished and wrought copper plate, with lighter spot decorations, embossing and holes, mounted on a red-stained plywood panel.

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

Indiscreet Lock 2019

Mixed media: plexiglass artpiece with fabric inserts and oil finishings. datend and signed on the back. The artist says of himself: 'It is the great love for art that has driven me to realise 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'.