An original and eclectic artist, an abstract and informal painter, an inventor of provocative solutions, but also a writer, performer and promoter of events, Gianni Bertini (Pisa, 1922 - Caen 2010) was one of the protagonists of art in the second half of the 20th century.

100 works for 100 years: Frittelli arte contemporanea, on the centenary of his birth, presents the exhibition Gianni Bertini. Identikit 100, from 2 December 2022 to 21 April 2023, which retraces the fundamental stages of his artistic research, restoring the plurality of experimentation and the exuberance of the personality of an artist who, in his long life, strenuously read and interpreted reality with irony, courage and talent.

The occasion will see the official presentation of the Catalogue Raisonné of the artist, realized by the Archivio Frittelli per l'Opera di Gianni Bertini under the curatorship of Francesco Tedeschi, with the collaboration of Federica Boragina, Myrna Galli and Kevin McManus; the volume, in two tomes, was published by Electa and offers the most extensive scientific documentation of the artist's work.

The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Associazione Gianni Bertini (Milan), directed by Thierry Bertini, and with Sergio Grossetti, the artist's historic gallery owner, is the continuation of the homage paid to Bertini by the Fondazione Mudima (Milan) - Gianni Bertini. Mec-Art Display from 10 to 30 November 2022 - and presents to the public for the first time the maquettes, precious collages that are at the origin of the most famous and provocative subjects of Mec-Art's artworks.

The exhibition unfolds among different nuclei of artworks, from the beginnings with I Gridi series (1948-49), paintings that anticipate Pop Art languages, with letters, numbers and signal symbols, to the fleeting but significant adhesions to MAC and Nuclear Art (1950-1952), to the enchanted atmospheres and mythological references of Informal painting, with a focus on the large-scale canvas papers of 1959, and finally to the emulsion canvases of the Mec-Art series, to which belong famous artworks such as: La double himera (1965), Stilmec (1967), Seguite quella ruota (1967).

The exhibition will also be an opportunity to unveil lesser-known episodes in the artist's history: Comunicazioni interdisciplinari [Interdisciplinary Communications] (1971), the “bertinizzazione” [“bertinization”] 1961-62, the artist's books, the many editorial experiments, the video-interviews, as well as the multifaceted extravagance that inhabited Bertini's everyday life.
 

"Almost all people cultivate the gift of memory, and those who have none practice having one. 
In my case, however, I have always practiced forgetting. Firstly, I want to forget my paintings, their image and workmanship. I forget them for fear of imitating myself. 
Only the gesture, its precision, its language, I have always been interested in refining. 
So to bring forth a new meaning each time, forgetting the previous form.”
Gianni Bertini