The Fondazione Giorgio Cini is hosting an exhibition of Franco Gentilini Ritratti di Luciana  in the exhibition room of the Manica Lunga from 15 June to 14 July.

The twenty drawings by Franco Gentilini (1909-1981), donated by his widow Luciana to the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in 2017, are testimony of the artist’s last, intense period, from his wedding in 1970 to his death in 1981. An important sphere of his artistic research, developed during his long preparation as an illustrator for magazines like “Quadrivio”, “L’Italia Letteraria” and “La Fiera Letteraria”, drawing was a fundamental stage in Gentilini’s creative formulation. In these sheets he attained the typical, graceful, archaising style that made him the last representative of postwar metaphysical painting, as perceived with foresight Carlo Cardazzo, who was his dealer for a long time.

The Fondazione Cini’s body of graphic work by Gentilini, almost entirely on show in this small exhibition, intended as a tribute to the master and to the generosity of his widow Luciana, consists of drawings with various techniques (red pencil, watercolour pen, charcoal, tempera) and chronology: twenty striking portraits of Luciana Gentilini that make up a ‘private’ gallery rich in subtle expressive modulations and marked by fascinating iconographic recoveries from the portrait tradition of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.