Franco Gentilini biography

- FRANCO GENTILINI PAINTER

Frank Gentilini was a Italian painter. He was born in Faenza in 1909. 

Between 1921 and 1925 he enrolled in the evening courses of the Municipal School T. Minardi of Drawing and Plastic for Artisans. In the same period he went to Bologna to show his drawings to the painter John Romagnoli, holder of the painting chair 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 Third room of the Caffé Aragno knows Ungaretti, Cardarelli, Barilli, Mucci, Cecchi, Sinisgalli, Diemoz, Beccaria, Cagli, De Libero It is Sparhawk. The following year he held his first personal exhibition at The Gallery of Rome. The following years saw him participate in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad.

In the forties, Franco Gentilini combines his pictorial production with an intense graphic production and is linked to the collector and art dealer Charles Cardazzo who will also represent him abroad. 

The artistic style of his works is characterized by the use of painting and drawing on a material preparatory background mixed with sand. The themes of his works are cathedrals, baptisteries, jugglers and itinerant musicians, landscapes with irregular perspectives, women characterized by ankle boots with spool heels, bicycles, trucks, cats and lions. Franco Gentilini is the artist of joy of living even if in these years he portrayed a world shattered by the Second World War. 

In the 1970s he began to devote himself to the creation of sets and costumes for the theater and he participated in exhibitions of contemporary Italian art in Spain, France, Japan, São Paulo in Brazil and New York.

Franco Gentilini died in Rome in 1981.