VASCO BENDINI | Volti e diluvi. Works from the collection of Palazzo Collicola
curated by Lorenzo Fiorucci
Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto 9 April – 29 May 2022

Volti e diluvi. Works from the collection of Palazzo Collicola is a solo exhibition for the 100th anniversary of the birth of an artist who has marked the destiny of much of thedevelopment of Italian painting from the post-war period to the early 2000s. Although Vasco Bendini (Bologna 1922 – Rome 2015) was originally from Emilia and lived in Rome for many years, he was particularly close to Spoleto thanks to his friendship with Bruno Toscano, which had developed since the days of the Spoleto Prize, which he won on two occasions (1955 and 1957), and which continued to be cultivated over time until the donation of a substantial nucleus of works, almost all from the 1950s, desired by Vasco and made by Marcella Valentini Bendini, to enrich the Spoleto gallery in 1989. It was therefore an important relationship with the city and its museum, that today intend to pay tribute to him by rediscovering that group of donated works, including the only surviving example of the Diluvi cycle. In the exhibition curated by Lorenzo Fiorucci, the works alternate with documents and critical analyses, in particular by Francesco Arcangeli, Bendini’s first supporter as well as an influential critic of the Spoleto group. In fact, it was through the theorisation of the last naturalism that the debate opened in Italy, as early as 1954, around a young generation of artists (in particular Emiliani and Lombardi, but also the Spoletini), in which Vasco Bendini was, together with Mattia Moreni, Ennio Morlotti and others, among the protagonists of this critical event that opened up a new, existential vision of art. Bendini, who around 1950 “struggled with Masaccio”, as Arcangeli recalls, immediately afterwards “began to fill large pastel papers with storms and deluge: whirlwinds that we can barely remember, agitated coils, blacks that avalanche on themselves. Nothing remains of them: and yet the abandonment to that very isolated and almost absurd anarchy was […] of an absolute frankness”. As we have said, the only remaining evidence of the Diluvi is in Spoleto, but alongside this are canvases and papers of intense spiritual afflatus, mistaken at the time for eternal abstraction; looking at them today, they disclose intense and delicate shadows of subtle faces, oscillating between the memory of the image and an almost subconscious vision, generated by small strokes. It is the grammar of informal tachisme that emerges and returns these images with intense emotion. These are the years, from the beginning of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1960s, with an appendix on the 1980s, when the artist returned to reinterpret some of the initial themes of his rich artistic career, that interest the Spoleto exhibition, which is accompanied by the publication of the catalogue, offered by the Freemocco publisher of Deruta; among other contributions, it includes an interview by Bruno Toscano.

Vasco Bendini (Bologna 27 February 1922 – Rome 31 January 2015) A pupil of Virgilio Guidi and Giorgio Morandi, he attended their courses at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, but his first exhibition was held in Lombardy, in Milan at the Bergamini Gallery in 1949. Over the following decade he exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions, in particular in Florence in 1953 at the Galleria La Torre presented by Francesco Arcangeli who shortly afterwards included him in the group of the Last Naturalists theorised in the pages of the magazine “Paragone” (1954). In 1956 he took part in the Venice Biennale in 1959 and was invited to the Rome Quadrenniale, while in 1961 he was in Brazil at the São Paulo Biennale and in 1962 at the Tokyo Biennale, and then again in Venice in 1964. His painting was influenced by Informalism, in the Archangelian declination of nature tinged with an inclination towards abstraction. The turning point came in 1966 when, presented by Giulio Carlo Argan at the L’Attico gallery in Rome, a certain formal inflection appeared in his painting that would be typical of arte povera. This trend was also confirmed a year later, when he presented his canvases at the Studio Bentivoglio in Bologna, with an essay by Arcangeli. The 1970s opened with his third participation in the Venice Biennale in 1972, invited by Renato Barilli. In 1973 he moved to the capital, where he returned to live in 2012 after an interval of working in Parma. These are the years in which he inaugurated important personal and anthological exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including the C.S.A.C. in Parma, the Italian Cultural Institute in Cologne, the Saarbruecken Museum of Modern Art and the Saarlouis Museum of Modern Art, the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, the Franco Antonicelli Cultural Union in Turin, the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua, the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Spoleto, the P.A.C. in Milan, the Pinacoteca in Ravenna, the Galleria Civica in Modena, Palazzo Forti in Verona, the Galleria Civica d’arte contemporanea in Trento, the Loggetta Lombardesca, the Museo della Città in Ravenna, the Palazzo Comunale in Salò, the Museo Laboratorio d’Arte Contemporanea of the University La Sapienza in Rome, the Teatro Farnese in Parma, the Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano, the Civica Galleria in Lissone, the Museo Bocchi in Parma, the Castello Masnago in Varese, the MACRO in Rome, the Museo Palazzo de’ Mayo in Chieti. During his stay in Parma, he received numerous awards for his career, including the 2002 Lissone Prize, the Marina di Ravenna Prize, the Guglielmo Marconi Prize, the G.B. Salvi Prize in Sassoferrato (Ancona), the Targa Ricordo Volponi in Bologna, and the tribute exhibition at the MACRO in Rome. In 2009, under the presidency of Marcella Valentini Bendini, the Archive of Vasco Bendini’s work was set up in Parma and later transferred to Rome. Vice President Irene Santori. Finally, in 2012 the last monograph of the artist was presented at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome.