Gianfranco Zappettini (bilingual edition)

Gianfranco Zappettini (1939) is one of the most relevant living abstract Italian painters.

He was one of the founders of the Analytic Painting international movement in the 1970s, which spanned Italy, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. His work was exhibited in public museums across Europe, including the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome, the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Notably, he participated in "documenta 6" in Kassel in 1977.

The London exhibition will showcase several completely new series of works, all exploring the symbolic meaning of gold. Here, gold is perceived not as a luxury material, but as a representation of spiritual perfection. This work weaves the colour gold as a common theme throughout the installation, drawing philosophical inspiration from eastern doctrines such as Taoism, Zen, and Sufism, with which Zappettini is deeply familiar. As the artist mentions in the catalogue text, "while the time of myth is cyclical, there is also correspondence between past and future, between end and beginning, because what has been will necessarily repeat again. A new 'Golden Age' will follow the age in which we are living - a final epoch, degenerate and stripped of spirituality: this narrates the myth and this may prefigure art, capable of conserving the most profound values and, like myth, of passing the confines of time."

The Turin exhibition will also present other series from the past decades, specifically from the 1990s and the 2000s.

The catalogue features texts by Martin Holman, Klaus Honnef, and Paola Valente, providing further insight into Zappettini's body of work.