Aldo Mondino & Lorenzo Puglisi - Vis a Vis

from 17 May 2025 to 27 September 2025

Biella

Aldo Mondino & Lorenzo Puglisi - Vis a Vis

On Saturday 17 May, Woolbridge Gallery will open its new exhibition, VIS À VIS, bringing together works by Aldo Mondino – an eclectic artist and one of Italy’s leading post-war figures – and the painterly explorations of Lorenzo Puglisi.

Mondino’s canvases take us on journeys into ever-changing worlds, both in terms of the subjects portrayed and the use of materials found in his works, such as wool, coffee, sweets, and the chocolate drips of his beloved Piedmont, his native region.

Amidst large-scale canvases, unexpected silences, and bodies free in space that seem to emerge like flashes from dark backgrounds, we find, instead, Puglisi’s essential painting, which invites the viewer to recognise the journey through the history of painting.

Both from Piedmont, the two artists experiment through their personal sensibilities, exploring worlds and journeys scrutinised with care, despite Mondino’s beloved ‘short-sightedness’, central to all his creations. Adjacent temporal spheres—past and present, light and shadow, day and night—are now placed ‘face to face’ through a temporal dialogue, composed of canvases, thoughts, visions and dreams.

The exhibition, which will be held on the first floor of the gallery, will also feature works by artists who were friends of Mondino: Gino De Dominicis, Enzo Cucchi, Luigi Ontani, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Julian Schnabel.

Special thanks to MENABREA, technical partner of the exhibition

Aldo Mondino (Turin, 1938 – 2005) moved to Paris in 1959, where he attended William Heyter’s studio, the École du Louvre, and took the mosaic course at the Academy of Fine Arts with Severini and Licata. In 1960, upon returning to Italy, he began exhibiting at the Galleria L’Immagine in Turin (1961) and the Galleria Alfa in Venice (1962). His meeting with Gian Enzo Sperone, director of the Galleria Il Punto, proved pivotal for his artistic career, and their partnership continues to this day. Major solo exhibitions were also held at the Galleria Stein in Turin, the Studio Marconi in Milan, the Galleria La Salita in Rome, the Galleria Paludetto in Turin, and a first retrospective at the Galleria Santo Ficara in Florence (2001). Among his major exhibitions were his two participations in the Venice Biennale in 1976 and 1993, solo exhibitions at the Museum für Moderne Kunst – Palais Lichtenstein in Vienna (1991), at the Suthanamet Topkapi Museum in Istanbul (1992, 1996), at the Jewish Museum in Bologna (1995), and at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Trento (2000).
He was one of the most brilliant Italian artists of the post-war period. His talent was eclectic, irreverent and fantastical, and defies comparison. A great painter and a great sculptor, ironic, picaresque, an intellectual devoid of any arrogance, he has left a mark that is becoming increasingly significant on the international scene with each passing year.
Lorenzo Puglisi was born in Biella in 1971; he lives and works in Bologna. His pictorial exploration stems from his observation and admiration for the greatest masterpieces in the history of Western art. From the Sistine Chapel to Leonardo’s Last Supper, from Caravaggio to Correggio, from Tintoretto to Rembrandt, Rubens and Goya, faces, poses and hands are selected by the artist’s eye and rendered on the canvases, painted in monochrome black with swift, full-bodied brushstrokes, where the predominant use of white is enlivened by flashes of red or blue. These fragments of faces and body parts, captured in an expression or a gesture, are not a lack or a progressive negation: they are to be understood, on the contrary, as apparitions that, emerging from the darkness, manage to impose themselves upon it, presenting themselves to us at the very moment they take shape in reality, the moment they find their essence. It is no coincidence that the body parts the artist extracts and reproduces on the canvases are almost always heads, faces and hands: it is here that the substance and expressive capacity of a human being are concentrated, in their thought and in their gestural expression. Solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, at the CAC La Traverse in Paris (2015), the Museo Riso in Palermo (2016), the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples (2017), The Historical Museum in Bremen (2017), Villa Bardini in Florence (2017), the Casa Boschi Di Stefano Museum in Milan (2018), the Kulturhaus in Berlin (2019), the Crypt of King’s Cross St. Pancras Church in London (2019), the Bramante Sacristy in Milan (2019), Norman Foster’s Moore House in London (2020), the Marino Marini Museum in Florence (2021). Among his major exhibitions, he has participated in the Venice Biennale (2022) and at the Uffizi Galleries (2023), whilst in 2019 he exhibited at the Last Supper in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death.