In the year that marks the centenary of Vasco Bendini's birth, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art offers the public the opportunity to rediscover the multifaceted production of the artist, tireless in feeding a multifaceted research that sees the use of different techniques and materials: newspaper, canvas, glass wool, cardboard, foam rubber, resins, consumed candles, neon and plastics. Vasco Bendini is a protagonist of the Informal and, albeit for a very short period, he became sensitive to the cultural climate and to ways that have become distinctive of Arte Povera, even though he has never been a part of it.

The exhibition VASCO BENDINI. OMBRE PRIME, curated by Bruno Corà, exhibits a selection of works ranging from the 1950s to the 2000s, testifying how intense the painter's activity was even in the last years of his long life. Vasco Bendini (Bologna 1922 - Rome 2015) is the exponent of an artistic path that often sees him as a forerunner of techniques and languages. His is a discontinuous itinerary, but this apparent lack of linearity actually shows an intimate coherence in revealing to himself and to the user the secret essence of self and of matter.

Between 1941 and 1942 Vasco Bendini attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where he has Giorgio Morandi and Virgilio Guidi as teachers. It is from their lesson that the artist takes the first steps in the direction of a painting that we could define as metaphysics, but the figurative element will become more and more abstract since 1948, with the sharp incisiveness of a conscious gesture that, in its essentiality, wants arrive at the supporting and universal structure of the ego. The faces, the heads are born, those that Arcangeli called the "veronica" and Vasco Bendini called "secret signs".