Almost three years after the death of Raimondo Sirotti (25 September 1934 - 1 May 2017), Genoa pays tribute to one of its most significant artists of the twentieth century, with an exhibition event divided into three prestigious locations, Palazzo Ducale, Villa Croce and Accademia Ligustica di Fine Arts, so as to offer the public for the first time a retrospective on his entire production, which covers a chronological span of about sixty years, starting from the immediate post-war period up to the last canvases.

His painting, now fervent with images, now tenderly shattered with lights, as Gianfranco Bruno described it; his informal naturalism and his figures that stopped the uninterrupted flow of the sensation that so pleased Roberto Tassi; his art strictly faithful to itself, as Maurizio Calvesi decreed; miracle of imprinted evanescence, the settling of the shadow within the domain of light, as Marco Goldin wrote, will be presented to the general public in the first major retrospective.
Present in many anthological exhibitions and protagonist of several personal exhibitions in institutions including institutional, not only in Italy, Sirotti's entire career is studied and proposed, from the beginnings that see an important formative moment in Milan at the end of the 1950s, up to success and numerous public offices since the nineties.

Genoa, which saw him work as an artist, also heavily involved in teaching as a teacher and then president of the Ligustica Academy of Fine Arts, is the city appointed to host the great Sirotti retrospective: at Palazzo Ducale , for its barycentric cultural role , and at Villa Croce, the Museum of Contemporary Art which houses the most important collection of works by Ligurian artists of the twentieth century, as well as a historicized and widely recognized venue for the most important modern and contemporary art exhibitions in Genoa.

The curatorship involves Matteo Fochessati and Anna Orlando, art historians who came out of the Genoese University and differently active on several fronts, from research to dissemination.The first is a contemporary art historian and curator of the Wolfsoniana - Palazzo Ducale Foundation for Culture; the second is an art historian, specialist in seventeenth-century Genoese painting.

Both are curators of exhibitions and creators of cultural initiatives in their own city and outside, and together they constitute an ideal combination that combines different skills for a wide-ranging reading of the various aspects of the artistic figure of Raimondo Sirotti, between modern and contemporary and constant linguistic experimentation. comparison with ancient art.

The project is divided into two equally important and complementary chapters.

A hundred works will be exhibited at Palazzo Ducale to mark his entire creative path: from his beginnings in the second half of the 1950s, with rare works to be seen and mostly from museums, to the artistic turning point marked in the 1960s by his return to Liguria , from the beginning of the didactic commitment and from the fundamental trip to England; moving then in the seventies-nineties to the definition of his personal "abstract naturalism", up to the touching "interior landscapes" of the last decade of the century and his more recent works. Paintings from Italian public and private collections will be exhibited. There will be many unpublished works preserved in the painter's atelier: a precious material from which he never wanted to be separated, as in the case of the extraordinary albums with sketches and notes. Alongside a rich selection of works created for a private client, the exhibition will also document his intense activity in the field of public decoration.

In addition to the works loaned by the Raimondo Sirotti Archive which, coming from the artist's private collection, include exceptional proofs of his early experiments, all the main works conserved in public venues and in Italian museums will be exhibited. The "historical" works, milestones to retrace his path over the years, will be accompanied by those most loved by private collecting.