The exhibition “Fausto Pirandello. Painting and the human condition” was inaugurated on Wednesday, 11 June 2025 at the Italian Cultural Institute of Paris, where it will remain open to the public until 3 October. The opening was attended by the curator and Giovanna Carlino Pirandello, President of the Fausto Pirandello Foundation.
Celebrated by critics for the expressive intensity of his painting, Fausto Pirandello (Rome, 1899–1975), son of the Nobel Laureate for Literature Luigi Pirandello, returns to Paris on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death with a representative selection of over sixty works, including paintings and works on paper. The exhibition outlines the profile of a prolific and original artist, whose solitary and introspective artistic journey anticipated some of the most profound tensions in 20th-century painting, from Lucian Freud to contemporary figurative artists.
Over the course of his fifty-year career, Pirandello moved from an early engagement with French painting—he lived in Paris in the late 1920s—to the expressionism of the interwar period, and in his mature years to Cubist deconstruction, culminating in an intense and tragic portrayal of the human condition.
The exhibition unfolds through five thematic sections that guide visitors into the artist’s pictorial world: it opens with a section dedicated to the complex relationship with his father, Luigi Pirandello, continues with a selection of self-portraits (a genre to which Pirandello returned throughout his artistic life), presents a focus on his Parisian sojourn—marked by nudes and still lifes—and concludes with two sections rich in uneasy experimentation: “An inquiry into the human condition” and “Form and matter: the search for a language”.
