The Desperate, Circa 1980

Giuseppe Migneco  

Giuseppe Migneco was an Italian painter, one of the greatest Expressionists of the 20th century. At the beginning of his artistic career, Giuseppe Migneco painted paintings of autobiographical content, created in atmospheres alive in his memory. In 1934, he came into contact with some important painters like Renato Birolli, Raffaele De Grada and Aligi Sassu, who guide him to discover that pictorial world towards which, nebulously, but also irresistibly, he had always felt attracted. 

Some years later, in 1937, he was among the founders of the "Corrente" movement, which brought together artists from different cultural horizons, with the common intention of opening up to modern European culture, rejecting the cultural isolation imposed by fascist politics. This artistic group will embrace artists like Badodi, Birolli, Broggini, Cassinari, Cherchi, Gauli, Guttuso, Manzù, Morlotti, Paganin, Sassu, Valenti, and Vedova. Migneco's art fits into the furrow of social realism, a realism characterized by the influence of Mexican muralism, interpreted with a more rigid and cutting linearity that makes him a "wood carver who sculpts with a brush", according to the happy definition of one of his admirers. Strong and sincere Expressionist, Migneco does not know half shades or semitones. The faces of his characters are the expression of a hard land that dispenses pain and fatigue. Humanity is illustrated in its existential struggle, in the continuous and profound confrontation with itself and with the events that besiege it, in consciousness and in the hope of freedom and memory, beyond the absurd solitude of existence. 

The Sicilian painter, who in over fifty years of work, has expressed in an increasingly courageous and obstinate way, through a masterful use of colors, his commitment as an artist and as a man, exhibited in the most prestigious national and foreign galleries: Gothenburg, Boston, Paris, Stuttgart, New York, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Zurich. Man on the Rock - Sculpture is a superb artwork realized by the Italian artist Giuseppe Migneco (Messina, 1903 - Milan, 1997).