Domenico Gnoli: Paintings from 1964–69 (2012) was the first U.S. exhibition dedicated to the artist in over four decades. The exhibition brought together 18 of his late paintings and a small group of drawings from the series What is a Monster? in which Gnoli investigated the possibilities of a modern-day bestiary. It included significant loans from the Fundación Yannick y Ben Jakober in Majorca; the Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf; the Fondazione MAXXI and the Galleria Nazional d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome; and the Fondazione Orsi in Milan.

In canvases at once theatrical and humble, intimate and remote, humorous and melancholy, artist Domenico Gnoli uncovered a universe of meanings in the details of everyday objects. His meditations on the material trappings of bourgeois Italian life directly challenged the politically charged discourse proffered by artists of the burgeoning Arte Povera movement by suggesting that identity is constructed primarily around consumerism and commercial choices. Supra-realistic, subtly colored, luminous, and large, his paintings suggest subjecthood in the width of a pinstripe or a lady's leather handbag. Regarded as a precocious genius pruned too soon by fate, Gnoli died in 1970 at 36, a scant three months after an acclaimed solo exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York established him as a major talent. He left behind only several dozen paintings, most executed in the last five years of his life. Their enduring power derives less from their scarcity than the unique visual grammar of an oeuvre that escapes classification.

Domenico Gnoli: Paintings from 1964–69 reveals the artist’s ability to set himself adrift in an ocean of narrative while maintaining exquisite control of the physical presence of his art. Gnoli’s fascination with the surface of his paintings links him to a central characteristic of Italian art since the Renaissance. By mixing sand and acrylic, he achieved a striking signature texture that pushes his subjects beyond the realm of the contemporary and into an almost archaic atmosphere redolent of Mantegna and Masaccio. Gnoli observed reality not through the mechanical lens of Pop Art, but through the eyes of a skilled craftsman inspired by the Quattrocento, thereby creating such images as White Bed (1968) and Poltrona (1966) that hover above time like antique frescos of the future. Gnoli’s paintings achieve their mystery and palpable tension by capturing a state of suspension between the past and the future. In each picture, we see a fragment magnified just before life’s inevitable progress transforms it forever—seconds before the carefully made bed is disturbed or the perfectly parted coif is mussed.