The exhibition that the city of Gubbio is hosting from 21 October 2023 to 7 January 2024 at the Logge dei Tiratori (entrance via della Repubblica, clock side) is dedicated to Leoncillo Leonardi. The exhibition “ Leoncillo. Return to Gubbio" , curated by Enrico Mascelloni, with the coordination of Francesco Balsamo and Elisa Polidori and the collaboration of Maurizio Stazi, also involves three other locations in the city of Gubbio in its visit itinerary: the Palazzo Ducale, the Diocesan Museum and the Park Hotel ai Cappuccini. Palazzo Ducale hosts two large sculptures by Leoncillo, among the most spectacular and important results of his final phase, acquired in the 1960s through the Gubbio Sculpture Prize. The Diocesan Museum hosts a work from a private collection, the Park Hotel ai Cappuccini presents some works, mainly from its Roman novitiate and the neo-Cubist season, focused on the renewal of the so-called "applied art", to the point of anticipating the subsequent results of the " anti-design”. Some of his best-known works are presented in the Logge dei Tiratori, accompanied by preparatory sketches both in ceramic and on paper.

The exhibition is promoted by the La Medusa Cultural Association with the patronage of the Umbria Museum Complex, the Municipality of Gubbio, the support of the Perugia Foundation and the contribution of the Umbria Region, in collaboration with the Diocese of Gubbio, Palazzo Ducale di Gubbio, the Host Association and the Park Hotel ai Cappuccini. Main sponsor is Colacem.

The artistic path of Leoncillo (born in 1915 in Spoleto, who died prematurely in Rome in 1968) goes through the crucial phases of the art of his time : the debut in the Roman schools, where it leads to extreme consequences, up to the threshold of the informal, the expressionist lesson of Scipione; the neo-cubism of the post-war period, in which the violent material periphrasis calms down, without however dying out, in a more ordered spatial organization; the last and celebrated decade of activity, in which the reconquest of a lost form occurs through radical acts such as the "cut".

The Gubbio exhibition addresses Leoncillo's work in the context of the Umbrian morphological and social "landscape" in which he was born and which will always remain decisive for a work that opens up to the most torrid temperatures of the twentieth-century avant-garde. From the first drawings with "Olive Trees" to the large "Tagli" and "San Sebastiano" of the final season, that "palimpsest of stones from the city where I was born" is present like an obsession that never wears out. Of all the phases of his artistic activity, the exhibition will present over 30 significant works, such as the Caryatid of 1945, the Tempo wounded of 1963, some large sculptures of his latest production, such as the White San Sebastiano of 1962, already acquired by the Company of Soggiorno di Gubbio through the Gubbio Sculpture Prize. The exhibition also presents a large and rigorous choice of works on paper , selected to be placed in relation with the sculptures on display, thus capturing their nature not only as preparatory sketches but also as actual variations.