Nanni Valentini

Nanni Valentini (Sant’Angelo in Vado, 1932 – Vimercate, 1985) is one of the most extraordinary and lively figures on the postwar artistic panorama. This volume documents his legacy in painting in a study of the Trasparenze, presented in a memorable exhibition in Milan in 1976: the homage due to Valentini at a time in which at last the profundity of his mastery has been to a large extent grasped, as well as a critical reappraisal of the tremendously anomalous character of those works at the time. The friendship with Fontana, Tancredi, Sottsass, Scanavino and the brothers Giò and Arnaldo Pomodoro, a strong inclination to study the most disparate fields of knowledge, and the immersion in the Milanese ambience of the 1960s enabled Valentini to develop his poetics toward a fundamental reasoning on the plastic form and the image, making him unique in the artistic debate of the time.

This volume, the first in a series dedicated to the artist, contains the critical essays of Flaminio Gualdoni, Luca Bochicchio and Alberto Salvadori, a selection of the artist’s writings, a biographical note and a reminiscence of Tiziana Valentini.