Press release – Vasco Bendini: L’Immagine accolta (curated by Flaminio Gualdoni)

20th September - 5th November 2016

Opening time: Tuesday - Saturday | 2 pm - 7 pm

L’immagine accolta (The received image) represents the climax of Vasco Bendini’s final season, which is for him, as rarely happens, no less significative than his historical periods. A final season intensified by a final lucidity, a wisdom which only a few are permitted to achieve.
Bendini has determined to make an experience, both initial and final, out of every work, in the absence of artificial and stylistic precautions.
Experiencing his atelier as a primary place of concentration and meditation, he abolished the same pictorial mediation clauses. His painting is the site of an unpredictable and indeterminate future. And Bendini lovingly participates in it as if it were a “paredros”, causing the onset and initial tuning of the process.
The conceptual and poetic premise is crystal clear. The ancient dispute on the " not doing the painting" that had been typical of his generation in between the '50s and '60s, is resolved in him thanks to the extremism of independence of his oeuvre meaning: up to be questioning, in “L’immagine raccolta”, about sense and nonsense, which does not concern the nature of the image as a product of painting but rather the reason of its own place in the world, in a sort of constantly repeated and definitive existential doubt.

Vasco Bendini was born in Bologna February 27, 1922.
He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where he studied under Virgilio Guidi and Giorgio Morandi.
After his debut at the Bergamini Gallery in Milan, presented by Guidi in 1949, in the '50s he began solo shows at the Galleria La Torre Florence, the Galleria del Milione in Milan, the Saletta di Modena, the Penthouse of Rome, the Apollinaire in Milan and at Mc Roberts & Tunnard London. His first appearance at the XXVIII Venice Biennale is in 1956. Shortly after (1964) he takes part in the XXXIII Venice Biennale with a dedicated room and then again in the XXXVI Biennale in 1972. Important solo exhibitions in museums and public institutions include the Cologne Institute of Culture, Museum of Modern Art in Saarbruecken, Museum of Modern Art in Saarlouis, Mantegna's house in Mantua, PAC in Milan, Galleria Civica di Modena, Palazzo Forti Verona, Galleria Civica d'Arte Contemporanea di Trento, Castello di Masnago Varese and MACRO in Rome.
He died in Rome January 31, 2015.