Sala "Fontana" - free admission
via Milano, 13

Hosted by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo ( , Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Casa del Jazz) and in collaboration with Fondazione Roma, chaired by Adv. Prof. Emmanuele F.M. Emanuele, the exhibition is curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, and includes more than forty works by the artist.
Within a few years Mimmo Centonze’s fame has grown exponentially: the exhibition at Palazzo delle Esposizioni presents a rigorous selection of works, some new and never before publicly exhibited.
The exhibition includes paintings and sculptures from public and private collection - including the famous portrait of mafia boss Totò Riina, lent from the first time by Mafia Museum in Salemi (Sicily) inaugurated by President of Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano in May 2010 – which outlines the last ten years of development of a vigorous artistic path that starts from the intense portraits made with exceptional sharpness and vigour, and the majestic but intimate figures portrayed in his studio, up to large and bright industrial hangar and monochromes to them inspired, astonish and mystical lighting insights that reach out to the divine. Works that reveal the extraordinary quality of Centonze’s painting, sought with perseverance and tenacity in the course of nearly twenty years of activity through the study of the most authoritative treatises on painting, referring to the work of important masters of the past, from Titian, Rembrandt, Hals, Velazquez, Van Dyck, Constable, to Giorgio De Chirico and Lucian Freud.
A significant monographic exhibition, therefore, divided into sections of a few selected works, The artist’s father I (2002), that opened the show, and The artist’s father II (2003), which together with the other four portraits dedicated to the father figure presented in this occasion, give us an unforgettable testimony to the emotional and artistic relationship between them. For the first time also shows Woman on parquet (2008),with an unusual estrus is represented in a unique posture and perspective, as well as inedited large-scale sculpture Conversion (2011), made in aluminium and oil on canvas, set at the entrance of Sala Fontana. In the exhibition, Hangar (2009), work which, together with Totò Riina (2010), was exhibited at LIV International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale. Finally, the large canvases dedicated to the theme of industrial hangar, with their dramatic impact and their tense, which disorient and attract visitors as the light of the end of a cave. Work of great emotional intensity that close the fascinating exhibition.
Great novelty of the show is represented by the original and unseen setting of Sala Fontana, never realised before this occasion: the works will be collected in order to create a particular triple concentric path which will show the portraits and figure on the outer perimeter of the room, while inside the hangar works. Finally, on the walls at the centre of Sala Fontana will be exhibited the luminous monochromes. All the work will be exposed in anticlockwise and chronological order, from 2002 to 2012.
A deliberately gathered exhibition, therefore, able to provide the general public a concise and meaningful approach to the artistic path of Mimmo Centonze. ‘Few artists of our time have, more than Mimmo Centonze, the sense of vastness of space’, has written about him Vittorio Sgarbi. The President of Fondazione Roma, Adv. Prof. Emmanuele F.M. Emanuele, said: ‘I’m a convinced estimator of Mimmo Centonze...I consider him one of the most brilliant artists of the new generation’.