Sangallo Fine Art presents, from 5 September to 31 October 2026, L’ordine delle cose inquiete. Lucio Del Pezzo e il teatro delle forme, an exhibition curated by Lorenzo Madaro and dedicated to one of the most independent figures in postwar Italian art.
Through a substantial selection of works spanning the 1960s to the 2000s, the exhibition retraces some of the pivotal moments in the artistic research of Lucio Del Pezzo (Naples, 1933 – Milan, 2020), bringing together paintings, assemblages, shaped paintings, reliefs, casellari, and sculptural constructions.
The exhibition opens with works from 1963, including Decorazione and Composizione. In the former, ornamental motifs and architectural memories emerge across a layered surface; in the latter, the assemblage of painted wood already pushes the painting toward a tangible, structural dimension. Composizione, exhibited at the 5th International Art Biennale of San Marino in 1965, marks an early and decisive phase in which painting, object, and structure begin to merge. Also dating from 1965 is Indicazione, in which the image of a hand directs the viewer’s gaze without offering a destination, anticipating the repertoire of signs, directions, and instruments that would recur throughout the artist’s entire oeuvre.
Particularly significant is the group of works from the second half of the 1960s. The Beatles (1966), executed in acrylic on shaped plywood, and Paris 1966. Studio per scultura, made in acrylic, mixed media, and collage on paper, demonstrate how Del Pezzo absorbed the atmosphere of Pop culture while distancing himself from the mere reproduction of media imagery. Contemporary references are transformed into emblems, signs, and constructions. Also from 1966 is Casellario, a fundamental work in defining one of the artist’s most enduring inventions: a grid within which targets, solids, geometric profiles, and small objects are separated and recomposed according to an order that, rather than resolving their meaning, heightens their ambiguity.
The year 1967 is represented by works such as Tre elementi liberi in un interno, 3 Boules, Tableau bizarre, and above all Canova. Standing nearly 2.7 metres high, the latter translates a dialogue with artistic tradition into a vertical, rigorously white, almost architectural construction. The memory of Classical sculpture emerges through the balance of volumes, the play of light, and the very idea of monumentality, while the human body disappears, leaving form itself to take centre stage. In Tableau bizarre, over one and a half metres tall, the ambiguity between painting, sculpture, furniture, and stage set becomes strikingly evident, defining a liminal territory that Del Pezzo would continue to explore in the years that followed.
The year 1968 is represented by several Composizioni, works on paper, and Pyramid IV, a construction seventeen centimetres deep in which the word “PYRAMID” and the geometric figure coexist within a black recess. Name, image, and object appear to coincide, yet only superficially: the pyramid simultaneously becomes a sign, an architectural form, a primary geometric structure, and a mental presence.
With Oggetto metafisico (1969), Del Pezzo’s research expands decisively into three-dimensional space. Spheres, turned elements, and angular structures compose a small sculptural landscape, almost a model of an imaginary architecture, making particularly evident the “theatre of forms” evoked by the exhibition title.
This theatrical vocation reaches an emblematic expression in Teatrino (1975). From a dark structure emerge wings and coloured silhouettes arranged like figures awaiting the beginning of an action. Also dating from the same year are 4 oggetti su un piano e scala cromatica and an untitled work organized through a grid of signs and figures. Colour, sequence, module, and classification assume the rigorous appearance of a system, continually disrupted by the individual character of each element. The painting resembles a demonstrative chart, yet the experiment deliberately remains unresolved.
The 1980s are represented by the circular works of 1981 and 1984. The round format alters the traditional hierarchy of top and bottom, arranging silhouettes, targets, and small objects according to almost orbital balances. The pictorial space thus takes on the character of a dial or a field of forces, in which forms appear to attract and repel one another.
During the 1990s, Del Pezzo’s visual vocabulary opens to a more explicitly emotional and autobiographical dimension. La più giovane mia collezionista (1995) incorporates a bell and the possibility of a gesture, introducing into the work the latent memory of sound. Russia, from the same year, takes the form of a small architectural casellario, inhabited by objects, fragments, a bell, a sphere, and chromatic sequences. Also belonging to this period is Mondo come misura e dissoluzione (V studio), a large-scale composition in which painted cardboard elements are distributed within a regular matrix, creating a kind of visual alphabet in which the desire to order the world coexists with its inevitable instability.
L’ordine delle cose inquiete retraces more than fifty years of artistic research through works, dates, and recurring cycles that reveal both continuity and transformation. New Dada, Pop culture, Metaphysical art, design, and the tradition of the object constitute coordinates that Del Pezzo explores without ever fully identifying with any one of them. At the heart of the exhibition lies the construction of a theatre without narrative: a stage inhabited by objects withdrawn from use, instruments that have lost their original function, and signs that continue to point without ever defining a destination. It is an order of remarkable clarity, perpetually traversed by the restlessness of forms.