After those of Renato Galbusera, Mino Ceretti and Piero Leddi, the exhibition dedicated to the portrait in the production of Floriano Bodini and Giuseppe Guerreschi is inaugurated in the rooms of the Gemonio Museum; with this tribute we give continuity to the in-depth reading of the protagonists of the New Figuration, through the works, writings, photographs, archive documents.

The project of the Floriano Bodini Civic Museum dedicated to Existential Realism and New Figuration continues with this initiative. The exhibition “Floriano Bodini, Giuseppe Guerreschi. The portrait ", which will be accompanied by the homonymous volume edited by Sara Bodini and Luca Pietro Nicoletti for the series" Archives of New Figuration ", aims to investigate a genre, that of the portrait, which has been a fundamental object of reflection and discussion in the dialogue between the two artists, linked by association since the late 1950s. As Luca Pietro Nicoletti and Sara Bodini, editors of the book, write, "comparing the respective results in this field helps to focus more clearly on the researches of both, bringing out the points of contact, references and citations of reasons iconographic that migrate from sculpture to painting and vice versa. Motifs born in the three-dimensional modeling, in fact, find explicit mention on canvas. At the same time, a certain way of thinking about images by juxtaposition of elements, congenial to painting and mindful of the lesson of collage, suggested a way out of the bust-portrait model, enriching it with a palimpsest of symbolic allusions ».

The exhibition brings together works - largely from private collections and not on public display for decades - produced by Bodini and Guerreschi between 1951 and 1975. We therefore start from the youthful premises of the period that will see them participating in the movement of Existential Realism to reach the end of this experience and the opening of a new and personal phase of research for both artists. Caroline Vezzani, curator of the exhibition with Luca Pietro Nicoletti, recalls how "both artists in the portrait are above all interested in bringing out the unseen: from time to time psychological, intimate, physiological, but also archetypal and social elements": portrait here becomes a key to reading to deepen the assonances and tangencies between the painter and the sculptor, both, as Giorgio Mascherpa wrote, "aiming to clearly frame the man, the symbol, the idea and the ideology of their time in peremptory forms and at the same time ambiguous ».