On Friday 30 September, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art inaugurates the exhibition of the Brandi Rubiu Collection , curated by Marco Tonelli. The Brandi Rubiu Collection is made up of a nucleus of 92 works, which Vittorio Brandi Rubiu donated to the National Gallery in 2001. These are drawings, paintings, sculptures, engravings donated to Brandi and Rubiu by artist friends who had frequented and / or whose they had written exhibition presentations and critical essays. Accardi, Afro, Angeli, Burri, Capogrossi, Ceroli, Cintoli, De Pisis, Fioroni, Guttuso, Leoncillo, Mambor, Manzú, Marini, Mattiacci, Morandi, Ontani, Pascali, Scialoja, Tacchi , are just some of the artists gathered in a collection unique of its kind, which testifies above all to an emotional and intellectual bond between one of the most authoritative Italian critics and writers of the twentieth century which was Brandi and his most passionate exegete and heir who is still today Rubiu, who became Brandi's adopted son in the 1985.

The exhibition collects, in addition to the works of art, also photographs of the collection in its original domestic location and in the setting up at the National Gallery in 2001 , when it was exhibited to the public for the first time. Among the works is also presented the last painting by Brandi executed in 1928 at the end of his activity as a painter "when I realized", stated the Sienese critic, "that I was painting with the eyes of others". The exhibition designed on this occasion also wants to be, between the lines, a respectful homage to the heir who has assiduously contributed and still contributes today to the work of dissemination and dissemination of a cultural heritage that has been an important legacy also for the future. generations of art critics and historians. In the selection of works that it was decided to propose, a synthesis of Italian art from the mid-twentieth century to the 1960s and beyond is outlined, passing through figuration, abstraction, the informal and the neo-avant-gardes.

The exhibition highlights not only choices of works of a donation but also of an upstream relationship that made it possible: Brandi chose Rubiu as heir as much as Rubiu chose Brandi as Master. After all, the very nature of the collection consists of artists known by Brandi and inherited from Rubiu, but also of artists of the same age as Rubiu who passed to Brandi: two entangled and in some ways exemplary lives.