Gino Bonfanti (Siena 1900 - Pisa 1958) - Market
Dimensions: 81x48 cm with frame
68x35 cm without frame
Oil painting on plywood. Signed and dated '53 at the bottom right.
Having moved from Siena to Pisa in 1927, bringing with him besides his family, the passion for art and painting, he quickly gained approval and the first successes.
Unexpected was then the acceptance in 1938 by competition to the XXI Venice Biennale, where he had a prestigious recognition: an award for the landscape.
This event of the Biennale almost certainly overwhelmed him. Bonfanti, in fact, made the drastic decision to abandon the security of working in a bank to devote himself with full freedom to painting. But sooner than expected, the euphoria of success faded and he had to face, with his family, all sorts of hardships aggravated by the outbreak of World War II. In the immediate post-war period (1948), the great national exhibition at Palazzo della Giornata, which was intended to be an incentive for the cultural and moral recovery of the city, also saw the presence of Gino Bonfanti with some works alongside those of Pisan artists including the emerging Gianni Bertini. He was present in the 50s at prestigious group shows such as the Rome Quadriennale. His painting was not noisy, did not exalt in chromatic splendor, in widespread brightness; it reflected his shyness and presented itself demure in compositional simplicity, in the calmness of tones. One could grasp, however, in it, that chaste melancholy, always filtered by a calm as continuous lyrical breath... He never let himself be involved by the new at all costs and even in designs in ink, pencil, he remained faithful to his compositional qualities with that usual naturalness, unharmed by any kind of forcing.
He died in Pisa in June 1958.
