Vatican Museums

Active in Rome from the 1930s, Franco Gentilini and Renato Guttuso have in common a constant fidelity to figurative work. Their intense activity demonstrates how the figurative and narrative instinct remains lively and diverse, despite the strong affirmation of tendencies towards abstraction during the same years. Guttuso maintains this link through constant reflection on the great masterpieces of the past, while Gentilini reinvents figurative work from within, giving rise to a fairytale visual language, sensitive to the European avant-garde but rooted in the Italian tradition, which revitalises the normality of the real with ironic and surreal atmospheres.