Nüart Gallery presents, Mediterranean Heart a solo exhibition of new work by Vincenzo Calli. The exhibition will run June 5th through June 21st 2020 with a virtual artist talk at 3:30pm MDT on Friday, June 5th.
Vincenzo Calli is known for oil paintings that celebrate the relationship between sensuality and innocence. Using the modern idiom of painting Calli explores ancient mysteries with figures that inhabit a mythic world that lies beyond time but are drenched in the light of the sun-soaked Mediterranean. Gently rendered in a soft dappling of strokes, Calli’s moments and figures are at once classical and modern-- timeless while also being very much of a specific place. As Michele Loffredo, Director of the National Art Museum, Medieval and Modern, Arezzo, Italy, writes, “You can not deny that the genius loci has an irreplaceable part in the work of Calli… every man inherits not only their genes but also their environmental, artistic, and cultural traditions.”
In this exhibition, Mediterranean Heart, Vincenzo Calli’s figures are captured in moments of stillness, contemplation, and reverie that seems to merge with the world around them. The figures seem deeply at peace in their lives and locations in a harmonious merging of nature, culture, and place. In this series, animals seem to affirm the dreamy contemplative moods of the human figures. Birds chirp the interior states of women swimming or dressing, and fish frolic with swimmers, almost as if stand-ins for their human counterparts’ inner joyfulness and emotional blending into the natural world. In one painting, a bather lounges in gentle dappled light by a creek or lake as frogs venture up the bank to join her, almost as if her reverie has summoned them, small compatriots in her gentle, dreamy mood.
Vincenzo Calli is from the rolling hills of Tuscany. He graduated from the Institute of Art in Sansepolco and then attended the Academy of Fine Art in Florence. Since 1974, he has participated in over 50 exhibitions throughout Europe, Canada, and the United States. Calli's paintings are in public, private and museum collections in Italy and in the permanent collection of the Boca Raton Museum, Florida.
