EXHIBITION n. 97
EXHIBITION TITLE: IL RESPIRO DELLA MATERIA
ARTIST: VASCO BENDINI
CURATED BY: GIORGIO CORTENOVA
INAUGURATION: SATURDAY 7 OCTOBER DALLE 18.30 ALLE 21.00
PERIOD: 7 OCTOBER 2006 - 30 JANUARY 2007

The 7th of October 2006 at 6:30pm the Gallery, La Giarina, inaugurates the exhibition, “VASCO BENDINI_IL RESPIRO DELLA MATERIA” curated by Giorgio Cortenova. A spacious personal show with works from the 50’s to recent times by an important protagonist and anticipator of the 'Italian Informal’. Vasco Bendini, born in Bologna in 1922, student of Virgilio Guidi e Giorgio Morandi, he was one of the painters most followed and loved by Francesco Arcangeli who had presented his first personal in Florence, Milan and Rome in the 50’s, years in which the series, “Segni Segreti” came to be , followed by the series, “Gesto di material” which started at the end of 1956 and continued to the 70’s.Author of refined culture, solitary and shy, but versatile and bold experimenter when it pertained to a piece. Bendini never wanted to admit himself to a school, so much so that in the 60’s his research moved on to object and behavioural art, in some sort of way anticipating the ‘arte povera’. However his authentic vocation painting won out. This return gave life to new cycles of work in the following years, which even more so define a unique figure in the context of Italian post-war painting. Uniqueness that defines maybe typical in that balance “fragile, instable, slippery” that Arcangeli had seen already in his first works, united with that “accentuation of the spirit” that raises the material to poetry.
Present at three editions of the Biennale of Venezia in 1956-1964 and 1972. Among the pmost important public exhibitions it’s worth mentioning “l’antologica di Palazzo Forti a Verona” in 1989 curated by Giorgio Cortenova, Galleria Civica of Modena, at the Mordern Art Gallery of Bologna and at Civica of Trento in 1992. In 1998 at the Museum of the ‘Università degli studi La Sapienza di Roma’ and in 2003 at the museum of Lissone.