Temporary Exhibitions
The exhibition The Space of Painting. Antonio Del Donno: Signs, Graphics and Geometries, presented at the National Art Museum of Moldova as part of the European Heritage Days, brings together a selection of 29 works by the Italian artist Antonio Del Donno (Benevento, 1927–2020), a distinctive figure of Italian art of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
Initially trained in the field of technical and architectural drawing, and later at the Artistic High School and the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, Del Donno developed his artistic language from a fascination with line, sign and geometry. As early as the 1950s, his ink drawings – urban architectures, roads and railways – announced his interest in graphic structures that would become a leitmotif throughout his work. In 1962, his first solo exhibition took place at the Pinacoteca in Benevento, while direct contact with the effervescence of the avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s opened up a perspective towards a language in which painting, graphics, the object, matter and the word coexist. During the same period, Del Donno regularly visited Lucio Amelio’s Gallery in Naples, one of the important spaces for new artistic directions in Italy, and participated in the major events of the time – Biennales, Triennales, Quadriennales, fairs and international exhibitions –, thus coming into direct contact with the radical transformations of contemporary art.
In Antonio Del Donno’s work, the surface of the artwork becomes a site of tension between the rigour of construction and the freedom of gesture. The geometric form, originating from his early interest in technical drawing, combines with texture, colour, writing and fragments of images in a language in which abstraction does not exclude references to reality. Geometry thus does not function merely as a principle of organisation, but as a structure within which the sign acquires symbolic value, while recognisable elements are detached from their usual context and integrated into a new visual logic. From this perspective, the title of the exhibition in Chișinău, The Space of Painting, can also be understood: not only as a designation of the physical surface of the artwork, but as a territory of image transformation, in which reality is decomposed and recomposed through sign, texture and geometry.
An essential chapter in his artistic creation, beginning in 1972, is represented by the “Gospels” – book-objects made of wood, in which the word is imprinted through fire, while matter acquires a powerful spiritual and symbolic dimension. Del Donno’s work thus unfolds between the sacred and the everyday, between word and image, while maintaining a critical attitude towards consumerism, superficiality and the transformation of art into a mere product.
His artistic career has received broad international recognition, with his works presented in important museum contexts and collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Vatican Museums and the Pecci Museum in Prato, as well as in numerous public institutions and collections across Europe, the United States, Japan, Australia and Latin America. A recent landmark in the reception of his work was the presentation, in April 2024, at MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome, of the volume Senza limiti. Vita e opera di Antonio Del Donno by Simona Lombardi, an event introduced by Alessandro Giuli, who at the time was president of Fondazione MAXXI.
In Romania, Antonio Del Donno’s work has been presented over time in Oradea, Baia Mare, Satu Mare, Târgu Mureș, Arad and Iași, establishing an ongoing dialogue with museum institutions and audiences in this part of Europe. The exhibition in Chișinău continues and extends this cultural journey, proposing a new encounter with the universe of an artist who traversed more than six decades of transformations in contemporary art without relinquishing the freedom of his own artistic language.
The 29 works brought together in the current exhibition reveal a body of work in which the sign becomes memory, geometry becomes tension, and colour becomes energy and a space of communication. Beyond the succession of stages and formal experiments, Antonio Del Donno’s work remains faithful to a fundamental idea: art as an act of freedom, questioning and communication.
Curator: Lăcrămioara Stratulat, Deputy Director General of the “Moldova” National Museum Complex, Iași
Project Coordinator: Enrico Gino Binaco, the artist’s exclusive representative for the European territory
