Sergio Risaliti – författare

This volume is the catalogue of the exhibition Depero. Fantastical Ride, held in the historic rooms of the Museum of Palazzo Medici Riccardi.Curated by Sergio Risaliti with Eva Francioli, the catalogue presents the work of Fortunato Depero, a multifaceted artist who was able to combine the popular element with a fervid figurative imagination. Starting with Neighing at Speed, a typically Futurist painting by Depero, the catalogue focuses on some of the most fascinating themes of Depero's production – from the myth of progress and speed, to the small theatres populated by ultra-modern puppets, to the rich production of tapestries, clothing – narrated through works from private collections and from the MART in Trento and Rovereto. It also includes a number of works that Depero made during a stay in New York in 1930.Text in English and Italian.

The volume is dedicated to the work of Jenny Saville (Cambridge, 1970), one of the greatest contemporary painters and a leading voice in the international art scene.Saville transcends the limits between figurative and abstract, between informal and gestural, managing to transfigure the news into a universal image, which puts the human figure at the center of the history of art. Huge, naked bodies, with a carnal physicality and oppressed by a weight that is more existential than material, Saville is linked to the great European pictorial tradition in constant comparison with the modernism of Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly and the portraiture of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon.Her work also outlines a strong correlation with the masters of the Italian Renaissance, in particular with some of Michelangelo’s great masterpieces. The volume contains a rich catalogue of paintings and drawings from the 1990s to today.

The works of Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) and Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), two notable authors of 20th century art, are compared for the first time in a project aimed at illustrating their points of tangency, the result of a shared sentiment whose ultimate aspiration is the search for the absolute.The volume therefore presents the ideal encounter and the powerful dialogue between these two figures, so distant in attitudes and in life, but equally linked by a reflection on the truth in art, which blossomed against the background of an era afflicted by questions about man and its role in the universe.Both have worked on matter by removing its encumbrance and opacity, poised between the primordial dimension of time and the cosmological dimension of space, animated by the same magnificent obsession, that for the invisible that is inside and outside of us, in the flesh and in the cosmos, in cells and stars.Texts by: Sergio Risaliti, Chiara Gatti, Paolo Campione, Alessandro Del Puppo, Serenella Todesco, Marco Senaldi, Cristina Beltrami, Marco Fagioli.

This volume pays tribute to Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the greatest exponents of photography of the 20th century, through an unpublished comparison with Wilhelm von Gloeden and Fratelli Alinari: a comparison evocative, at times pointed, that reveals the recurrence of common themes.The interest in the Ancient and the sculptural approach to the photographic medium come alive in the choice of subjects, the definition of poses and the suspended atmospheres of the compositions, leading to the discovery of an unconventional idea of beauty and eros.The shots, inspired by the canons of classicism, invite questions about the themes of the body and sensuality and offer themselves as food for thought on how art, morality and spirituality change and evolve continuously in their mutual relationship.

Challenging the canon of beauty that dominated portraiture until the 19th century, the works of Nathaniel Mary Quinn (Chicago, 1977) follow the path opened by the great artists of the 20th century, including Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon, freely interpreting the human figure, composition, and balance of forms through a non-academic pictorial language—at times grotesque, almost monstrous, and unsettling.In homage to Split Face, his first solo exhibition in Italy, presented in Florence across the Museo Stefano Bardini and the Museo Novecento, this volume brings together a selection of portraits displayed alongside works by Renaissance and 20th-century masters such as Donatello, Pollaiolo, the Della Robbia family, as well as Virgilio Guidi, Marino Marini, Antonietta Raphaël Mafai, and many others.Texts by Sergio Risaliti, Carlo Francini; conversation with Stefania Rispoli

This catalogue for a show by Italian artist Luca Pignatelli features a series of works painted on railway tarpaulins, wood, paper, sheet metal, and Persian carpets.

The catalogue for Teheran-born artist Ali Banisadr’s 2021 show in Florence at the Sala Gigli in Palazzo Vecchio and the Museo Stefano Bardini that marks the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death.

Cecily Brown (b.1969, London) is one of the most acclaimed painters working today. Her inimitable style shifts effortlessly between abstraction and figuration, confounding our understanding of these painterly modes and conventions. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples, this lavishly illustrated catalogue is an in-depth look at one of her most conceptually rich and expressive paintings. Cecily Brown: The Triumph of Death delves deep into this gigantic, multi-panel work, which features the figure of Death riding roughshod over a town and its residents. Inspired by a 1446 Italian fresco housed in the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, Italy, Brown’s The Triumph of Death is the culmination of a fascination with death that has permeated her work for several decades. With an introduction by Sylvain Bellenger and newly commissioned texts by Gavin Delahunty, Catherine Foulkrod and Sergio Risaliti, as well as featuring a set of related, previously unseen drawings, the book provides unparalleled analysis of this extraordinary work.Text in English and Italian.

Eccentric, perturbing and mannerist, the art of Rachel Feinstein (Fort Defiance, Arizona, 1971) has the ability to transport the audience into a dreamlike dimension that draws inspiration as much from classical art and Renaissance painting as from modern fairy tales and cartoons. Juxtaposing often contrasting genres, suggestions and styles, the artist shapes her works by proceeding by addition and juxtaposition, as in a modern pastiche with an almost grotesque and alienating result that does not intend to pursue beauty at all costs.Through a wide selection of texts and images, Rachel Feinstein in Florence offers a journey into the artist’s creative universe, taking the reader inside the monographic exhibition dedicated to her in three historic museums in Florence, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, the Museo Stefano Bardini and the Museo Marino Marini, in dialogue with their art collections.

Palazzo Vecchio portrays the architecture of the historic Florentine palace immortalised by the internationally-renowned photographer Massimo Listri. The first complete and organic photographic documentation of the building, updated in the wake of recent restoration and re-functionalization, the sequence of images runs page after page through the exterior and the interior of the palace. The alternation of rooms, courtyards and museum spaces, enriched by countless pictorial and sculptural elements, gives life, in Listri’s view, to a faithfully objective overview of the building that, since the end of the 13th century, has been the heart of Florence’s civic and political life, still today a place for meetings, debate and dialogue. The volume, edited by Sergio Risaliti, offers brief essays by experts on the subject such as Serena Pini and Carlo Francini, with a contribution by Mayor Dario Nardella.Text in Italian.