Portrait of Pino Arrigoni is one of the characteristic portraits made by Giancarlo Vitali during his long artistic career as a self-taught and always lived in seclusion from the clamor of contemporaneity.
The painter from Bellano was able to "tell" with great humility and, at times, melancholy irony scenes of everyday life starring men and women of his country of origin: the pharmacist, the priest, a woman intent on plucking a chicken, the gang of country and, in this painting, the cobbler. In all these subjects the emotional strength of the artist is striking, which makes each of his works of internal life vibrate, rendered through an intense and sculpted stroke, where colors blend in dynamic harmony

The work was donated by the same author to the Municipality of Lecco, following the exhibition "The family of portraits", held at Villa Manzoni in 1987 by Giovanni Testori who made it known to the general public.

Tino Stefanoni's art is characterized by the desire to "want to present things rather than want to represent them" and the most recurring themes in his works since the mid-1980s are landscapes and still lifes.
In Untitled F 97 the Lecco artist portrays everyday objects with measured austerity, accompanied, however, by a very subtle vein of emotion.

In fact, the neutrality of the design of his first researches now leaves room for emotion, suggested by the vibratile chromatism with which the artist dyes elementary subjects, which in a short time will become one of his best known works.

Location: room n. 2

Alfredo Chiàppori is a painter, cartoonist and writer of great national importance.
In 1969 he created the character that made him famous as an author and designer of political satire, “Up the subversive”. In the 1980s Chiàppori composes large acrylic canvases, which stage a "repertoire of colors and random rules, which fix their relationships".
Lichtesweben, inspired by twelve-tone music, occupies an entire wall of the Contemporary Art Gallery of Palazzo delle Paure and therefore also the entire visual field of the observer. The work compares the absolute value with the infinite variability of the chromatic series and establishes a module within which to analyze the dynamics of the different elements of the painting, from tones, transparencies, glazes, contours, surfaces.

Location: room n. 2

The world of fashion is what made Giovanni Gastel famous. In the decade between the Eighties and Nineties, his name was placed side by side with the great Italian designers (Versace, Missoni, Trussardi, Krizia) and in the following years he began his collaboration with French designers (Dior, Nina Ricci and Guerlain): his shots have undoubtedly changed the perception of the image of fashion at an international level.

Starting from the 2000s, his career was enriched with a new chapter: portraits of protagonists not only from the world of fashion, but of culture and design, art (Ettore Sottsass), music (Vasco Rossi, Roberto Bolle, and entertainment (Monica Bellucci) and politics (Barack Obama, Marco Pannella).
The secret of such great success lies in a mix of deep human empathy and the ability to read into people to satisfy their desires. This sensitivity of his allowed him to go beyond the glossy shot and the catwalk to devote himself to poetry and art in general.

In the case of the work “Prova d'Autore”, his perception of reality is combined with a profound aesthetic sense, which has always been constant in the works of the aristocratic photographer (he was the direct grandson of Luchino Visconti).
The large photograph, taken in 2007 and part of the "Masks and Spectra" exhibition curated by Germano Celant (Palazzo della Ragione, Milan, 2009), was donated by the artist in 2015 to the Municipality of Lecco.

Location: room n. 3

The work of Pino Pinelli spans a time span of over fifty years and, in its various forms defined by contemporary critics as "Analytical Painting", or "New Painting" or "Painting-Painting", the goal has always been to reveal in his works the essential elements of painting: color, field, line and light.

Painting R is characterized by simple but suggestive fragments of pure color (usually deposited by the fumes of an airbrush), which mimic the tactility of velvet. The work seems to move in white space, also thanks to the curved wall of the Contemporary Art Gallery in which we stand out the red shapes, highlighting the importance given by the artist to the relationship between matter and space.

Location: room 3

Giuseppe Maraniello's “Letters from a friend” was created in 2011 in memory of his friend Patrizia Frigerio from Lecco, on the occasion of an exhibition in her honor ten years after his death. By breaking down the letters of the name “PATRIZIA”, the observer is led to reconstruct its integrity.

Maraniello creates this sculpture totally representative of his own stylistic code, where painting, drawing, sculpture and everyday materials interact with each other, giving shape to an evident example of "Arte Povera", from which the painter draws on more than one occasion during the his artistic career.

Location: room n. 5

Ennio Morlotti is one of the main protagonists of the Italian and European artistic events of the second half of the twentieth century.
The work L'Adda in Imbersago is part of a series of works created by Morlotti, starting from the 40s and 50s, starring the landscape of Brianza Lecco, where he resided for many years. The artist begins at this stage of his artistic career to detach himself from figurative painting, to arrive at the Informal, giving life to the great "canto dell'Adda": "That landscape has always given me the impression of something immortal" writes the painter, enraptured by the memory.

Morlotti paints the nature of Brianza on the canvas: the woods on the banks of the Adda become expanses of green, brown and ocher, the river is nothing more than a dense strip of blues and blues with sparkling greens, the mountain turns into a span of pure color palette knives and the houses are simple silhouettes, red and white. The artist becomes part of the painting: in this way an atmosphere of total and enveloping immersion in nature is created.

Location: room n. 6

Sangregorio's sculpture penetrates the forms in the forms, the materials in the materials, the volumes between them, giving rise to archaic representations. In fact, the artist made study trips to Africa and Oceania to get in touch with local sculptors, understand and make their own the primordial reality that permeated their works.

Ciclope underlines the different perspectives inherent in the use of matter and in the interlocking of forms. Between the brightness of the marble and the darkness of the wood, the surface becomes color, space, light, thus highlighting the natural beauty of the materials.
The work was acquired with the "City of Lecco for art" initiative, carried out in two editions in the 1990s, with the aim of enriching city museums with contemporary works of art, enhancing local culture.

Location: room n. 6

Enrico Baj is one of the major protagonists of the Italian avant-garde that develops immediately after the war. In that period the artist abandons traditional artistic methods to look for new forms of expression, such as those expressed by Nuclear Painting, where we can recognize hints of the artistic currents of Surrealism and Dadaism, with abstract forms, signifying a surreal vision of reality. But it is the humor that the artist uses, at times irreverent, to describe the political facts of the time. A complaint that is expressed with different techniques, preferring collage, assemblages with different materials, engraving techniques, in addition to the painting with which it is usual to provide a powerful characterization of all the figures that represent power such as generals, ladies of the court, fake princesses

The Ubu dance depicts one of Enrico Baj's privileged subjects, namely Ubu, the legendary character created by Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) staged for the first time in 1896 in Paris. This, in particular, constitutes one of the background canvases for the representation of "Ubu re" in 1985, which the artist donated to the Municipality of Lecco in the nineties, on the occasion of the initiative "City of Lecco for art, now exhibited at Palazzo delle Paure.

Location: room n. 7

Enrico Castellani is one of the best known and most appreciated contemporary Italian artists also abroad.
After the first experiences inspired by American Action Painting, he approaches the “Spatialism” of Lucio Fontana and the provocative art of the exuberant friend Piero Manzoni.
Castellani and Manzoni founded, together with Agostino Bonalumi, the magazine "Azimuth", in 1959, the year of the first "Relief surfaces" by Castellani: monochrome canvases, mostly white, in which the artist goes in search of a spatiality beyond the canvas.

The work Superfice Bianca, made up of a canvas quilted on the back by wooden wedges, is one of the most interesting examples of Enrico Castellani's "spatialist" art. Pointing the canvas creates protrusions, recesses, protrusions that allude to a total space, on which light can flow and give rise to chiaroscuro vibrations. The latter continue beyond the physical contours of the work, thus denying the conventional two-dimensionality attributed to this pictorial support.

Location: room 7

The figure of the artist Mimmo Rotella is linked to the movement of Nouveau Réalisme and international Pop Art. In particular, the first phase of his activity was characterized by trips for study reasons to the United States during which he experiments with different painting styles that will lead him to revolutionize the artistic languages of the postwar period.

In the fifties, having returned to Italy, Rotella developed the technique that would make him famous in the contemporary artistic world: the décollage that is not used to build, but to demolish the work and was the "tear" the tool used to express himself. The protagonists of these early works are the stars of American cinema such as Marilyn Monroe, former muse of the great master of Pop Art Andy Warhol, whose works have influenced the artist's career.

Mec Art, assemblage, ready-made and Art-typo, Mimmo Rotella has ranged between different techniques and languages always trying to innovate and renew his own stylistic code.

In Sfera Rotella pictorially inserts symbols with mythical references and obscure meanings. The head of the Roman divinity, two-faced Janus, god of beginnings, of duplicity, guardian of entrances and thresholds, stands out in the center of the composition. The work also features the caption "Sphere", figuratively symbol of the earth and absolute geometric perfection. On this occasion the artist enjoyed combining symbolic images of ambiguous reading using the décollage as a support for images and writings, the real protagonists of the work.

Location: room 7