Franco Gentilini biography

Franco Gentilini was an Italian painter. He was born in Faenza in 1909. Between 1921 and 1925 he enrolled in evening courses at the T. Minardi Municipal School of Drawing and Plastic for Artisans . In the same period he went to Bologna to show his drawings to the painter Giovanni Romagnoli, holder of the chair of Painting at the city's Academy of Fine Arts, who encouraged him to continue and introduced him to the art critic Nino Bertocchi.
In 1930 together with his friend Giuseppe Liverani he went to Paris to study the Impressionists. In 1932 he moved to Rome where, attending the Terza Saletta del Caffé Aragno he met Ungaretti, Cardarelli, Barilli, Mucci, Cecchi, Sinisgalli, Diemoz, Beccaria, Cagli, De Libero and Falqui. The following year he held his first solo exhibition at La Galleria di Roma. The following years saw him participate in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad.
In the 1940s, Franco Gentilini combined his pictorial production with an intense graphic production and became linked to the collector and art dealer Carlo Cardazzo which will also represent him abroad.
The artistic style of his works is characterized by the use of painting and drawing on a preparatory material background mixed with sand. The themes of his works are cathedrals, baptisteries, jugglers and street musicians, landscapes with irregular perspectives, women characterized by ankle boots with spool heels, bicycles, trucks, cats and lions. Franco Gentilini is the artist of joie de vivre even if in recent years he portrays a world shattered by the Second World War.
In the Seventies he began to dedicate himself to the creation of scenes and costumes for the theater and took part at Contemporary Italian Art Exhibitions in Spain, France, Japan, Sao Paulo, Brazil and New York. Franco Gentilini passed away in Rome in 1981.