Exhibition: Sandro Chia. The two painters. Works on paper 1989-2017

Curator: Lorenzo Madaro

Exhibition venue : Fondazione Biscozzi | Rimbaud ETS, piazzetta Baglivi 4, 73100 Lecce – the spaces are fully accessible

Open to the public: 22 February - 15 June 2025

Timetable: Tuesday to Sunday: 4 pm - 7 pm. Closed on Monday

Full ticket: € 8,00; reduced: € 5,00 (for groups of more than 15 people residents in Lecce and in the province, children under 18, primary and secondary schools group, students of university, art academies and conservatories with booklets, teachers). Free admission: for children up to 6 years old, the disabled (and a companion), a companion for each group, tourist guides, journalists with ID cards.

Sandro Chia. The two painters. Works on paper 1989-2017 offers a reconnaissance of the production on paper of one of the great masters in the history of international art, an essential terrain of his artistic practice, which has accompanied him from the outset concentrating on the metamorphosis of images begun with his solo show in 1971 at the Galleria La Salita of Gian Tomaso Liverani in Rome. Sandro Chia (Florence, 1946) is an artist who sought out alliances in the history of images; he is a voyager who with a critical, and at the same time gentle, gaze has looked at the history of art in order to widen the range of action of his imagination. Looking today at his long history of some forty years of research into the innermost depths of painting, we can see the degree to which paper is for him not only a great space of freedom where he can experiment with authentic freshness and ingenuity within the orbit of his world inhabited by diverse presences and absences, but also a fundamental landing point, on the same level as the other fields in which he has actively engaged, from painting to sculpture to mosaics and graphics. This exhibition, mounted in collaboration with Galleria Mazzoli in Modena, presents exactly one-hundred works from 1989 to 2017, conceived especially with mixed media, gouache and tempera, thus real and proper paintings but also paintings and inks, which envelop his imaginary universe, dense with ironic and mocking visions, oscillations among bodies, symbols and allegories.

The show’s title – which echoes important, and by now historic, works, one of which, Due pittori al lavoro (1982) and the other I due Pittori (1990) – is a clear reference to the metamorphic nature of Chia’s efforts, always oriented on one side towards an advancement of the expressive lexicon and on the other towards a constant, obsessive reworking of fragments coming from the history of art.

In cooperation with Galleria Mazzoli - Modena.