On 23 June at the Bratislava Castle – Historical Museum opens the first exhibition in Slovakia of the artist Vasco Bendini, curated by Simone Frittelli and organised by the Italian Cultural Institute of Bratislava, with the collaboration of the same Museum, Frittelli arte contemporanea of Florence and the Italian Embassy in Slovakia.
A pupil of Virgilio Guidi and Giorgio Morandi at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Vasco Bendini (Bologna 1922 – Rome 2015) was from the 1940s one of the pioneers and protagonists of informal art in Italy and Europe. In the 1960s he worked in the new conceptual frontiers and devoted himself to the production of objects and installations, preceding the results achieved by Arte Povera. From 1970 he returned definitively to painting: his works were exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in international galleries and museums such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Saarbruecken Museum of Modern Art, the Saarlouis Museum of Modern Art, the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, the Casa del Mantegna in Mantua, the PAC in Milan, the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, the Scuderie del Quirinale and the MACRO in Rome.
His personal exhibitions include the one at the Attico in Rome (1966), presented by Giulio Carlo Argan, and the one at Studio Bentivoglio in Bologna (1967), presented by Francesco Arcangeli.
He has exhibited on several occasions at the Venice Biennale (1956, 1964, 1972), the Rome Quadrennial (1959, 1965, 1972, 1992), the São Paulo Biennial (1961) and the Tokyo Biennial (1962), and today he is one of the artists in the Farnesina Art Collection, kept in Rome at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
In 2010, he received the ‘Marina di Ravenna’ Lifetime Achievement Award, together with Georges Mathieu and Arnulf Rainer.
The exhibition “Io che cammino – 100” takes the title of a solo show by Vasco Bendini that opened in Florence in February 2020 and was unfortunately closed due to the sudden arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. The core of the original exhibition is now being expanded into a new retrospective, celebrating the artist on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth; the Bratislava exhibition takes place just a few days after the closure of the important anthological exhibition ‘Vasco Bendini. Ombre prime’, curated by Bruno Corà at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome and the opening of another exhibition at Palazzo Franchetti in Venice.
The exhibition is one of the highlights of the 15th edition of the Italian festival in Slovakia ‘Dolce Vitaj‘, which takes place under the patronage of the Mayor of Bratislava Matúš Vallo.
More information on: iicbratislava.esteri.it.
