Lorenzo Bonechi – La città delle donne

Seventy years after the birth of Lorenzo Bonechi (Figline Valdarno, 1955 – 1994), the Museo Novecento pays tribute to the Valdarno-born artist with a solo exhibition featuring 25 works in dialogue with the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition, titled La città delle donne, curated by Sergio Risaliti and Eva Francioli in collaboration with the Lorenzo Bonechi Archive, will be open to the public from Friday, July 4 through Wednesday, October 29, 2025.

Active from the late 1970s, Lorenzo Bonechi took part in the vibrant artistic scene of the 1980s, marked not only by the Transavanguardia, but also by Anachronism and Pittura colta. Rooted in a practice based on drawing, he experimented with printmaking and sculpture before devoting himself almost exclusively to painting from 1982 onward, working with tempera and oil.

Deeply rooted in Tuscan culture, Bonechi attentively looked to the art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, delving into the Byzantine tradition and Russian icons, combining spiritual inquiry with the study of historical and literary sources. This gave rise to works steeped in references to ancient painting and sacred iconographies, along a path marked by a rare expressive coherence.

In his early works, one finds a broken, restless line that, between 1986 and 1987, evolved into a new essentiality: strict compositional rigor and sharply defined fields of color, reaching toward an almost mystical stillness. From the early 1990s, however, his production opened to a new gestural quality, renewing his ongoing quest for balance between spirituality and humanity.

The exhibition seeks to highlight in particular the role of the female figure in the artist’s work. Ethereal yet grounded women, set against harmonious landscapes and minimal architectures, appear at times as hermit saints, at others as protagonists of an inspired sisterhood. Alone or in groups, they emerge as emanations of a dual nature, earthly and divine, evoking both images of Christianity and the Greek Korai, about which Bonechi himself noted in his diary:

“They are essentially human bodies in which one seeks to exalt the most perfect of created forms, the one most beloved by the gods […]. At first these statues may appear to us crude, rigid, lifeless, yet they are the first moving representations of humankind […] in the absolute nobility of its form.”

The exhibition explores some of the most recurring themes in the artist’s practice: figures suspended in time, the investigation of the sacredness of existence, the Celestial City, and the landscape—whether shaped by human presence or natural—which at times becomes the absolute protagonist of representation.

With this project, Museo Novecento aims to shed new light on an artist of extraordinary depth, who passed away prematurely but was already internationally recognized during his lifetime. His works were exhibited in prestigious museums and galleries: from the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo to the Tate Gallery in London, from the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum in Washington to the Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York.

Both critics and the art market acknowledged the value of his distinctive language, to the point of honoring him posthumously at the 46th Venice Biennale (1995). Today, his works are held in important public and private collections, including the Uffizi’s Prints and Drawings Department, Tate Britain, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.

Special thanks to Archea Associati, Leofrance S.p.A., and Tacheolab S.r.l.