Nothing remotely links the Florentine Renaissance busts of Baccio Bandinelli with the minimalist paintings and sculptures of present-day Turin artist Gianni Piacentino.
But by an “art coincidence” the work of both men, albeit with a 450-year gap in between, is currently attracting public attention in Berlin.
Since July of last year the Bode Museum has been prominently featuring in its Florentine Renaissance Hall the Bust of a Young Man by sculptor Bandinelli (1493-1560).
Art critic Klaus Grimberg, writing in the German Times, quotes one visitor as saying: “If Nefertiti is the most beautiful woman in Berlin’s museums, then this youth is the most beautiful man.”
Critics took another view of Bandinelli’s work during his lifetime. His art was often scorned and he was mocked as the “eternal runner-up” to Michelangelo (1475-1564).
His Hercules and Cacus on the Piazza della Signorina in Florence was even seen as “symbolizing his inadequacies as a sculptor.”
But today it’s different. The Bust of a Young Man is hailed by art connoisseurs as a heroic portrait of “classical beauty and melancholic tranquility.”
German museums liked it so much they bought it for an undisclosed sum from a London art dealer after a weak US dollar and the financial crisis drove its price down.
Not far from the Bode Museum, the work of Gianni Piacentino, a modern-day artist-sculptor, has also been pulling in the crowds at the unusually named El Sourdog Hex Gallery.
Located near the Checkpoint Charlie Museum documenting Berlin Wall escapes, the gallery is a brainchild of Reinhard Onnasch, a millionaire property dealer.
Onnasch uses the premises to display his huge private collection of paintings and sculptures assembled over the past 40 years.
Hundreds of works by artists such as George Brecht, Bernd Koberling, Kenneth Noland, Jason Rhodes and Claes Oldenburg have been shown over the past two years. Now it’s Piacentino’s turn.
Long a prominent figure on the Italian scene, the artist lives and works in Turin. Like others in the “arte povera” group, with whom he exhibited in the late 1960s, Piacentino began his career with a kind of homegrown minimalism that swiftly grew more richly metaphorical and suggestive.
Soon he was integrating his “other career” as a sidecar motorcycle racer and custom motorcycle painter into his art — by creating sleek, semi-abstract and elongated versions of racing cars, airplanes and motorcycles.
It is this element of Piacentino’s work that is now being spotlighted in a show titled Homage to the Wright Brothers.
Art critics argue that by defying prevailing currents, Piacentino arrived at certain artistic issues ahead of the crowd, and stayed on to “more deeply explore some of them long after the crowd had moved on.”
Property dealer Onnasch first began exhibiting “artists of my generation” in Berlin in the late 1960s, and later opened galleries in Cologne and New York.
The Piacentino exhibition, inaugurated on Nov. 10, runs until Dec. 27.
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