Virgilio Guidi On Sale

Virgilio Guidi was an Italian painter and teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. He was born in Rome into an artistic family. He was very passionate about geometry and design. He was trained under the guidance of Giulio Aristide Sartorio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and he was influenced by Spadini. He began to study artists such as Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Correggio and the French Chardin and Courbet and it was in this period that he began to reflect on the importance of light as a determining factor in his paintings. At the beginning of the 1920s, he began to see his paintings and visited The Third Room at the Caffè Aragno, where he came into contact with Giorgio De Chirico, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Roberto Longhi. In 1924, he achieved success at the XIV Biennale Internazionale d’Arte in Venice with his Tram, in which the desire to turn the image in a metaphysical sense is evident. At the end of the 70s his pictorial cycles became more intense, more restless and tense, these are the years of Meetings, Agitated Figures, Restless Figures. He took part in many important Italian exhibitions and was a member of the Novecento movement. He was very close to the Roman circle of the Comet of the Countess Anna Laetitia Pecci-Blunt. He died in Venice in 1984.

Used to refer to a time rather than an aesthetic, Contemporary art generally describes pieces created after 1970 or being made by living artists anywhere in the world. This immediacy means it encompasses art responding to the present moment through diverse subjects, media and themes. Contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, performance, digital art, video and more frequently includes work that is attempting to reshape current ideas about what art can be, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s use of candy to memorialize a lover he lost to AIDS-related complications to Jenny Holzer’s ongoing “Truisms,” a Conceptual series that sees provocative messages printed on billboards, T-shirts, benches and other public places that exist outside of formal exhibitions and the conventional “white cube” of galleries.

Contemporary art has been pushing the boundaries of creative expression for years. Its disruption of the traditional concepts of art are often aiming to engage viewers in complex questions about identity, society and culture. In the latter part of the 20th century, contemporary movements included Land art, in which artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer create large-scale, site-specific sculptures, installations and other works in soil and bodies of water; Sound art, with artists such as Christian Marclay and Susan Philipsz centering art on sonic experiences; and New Media art, in which mass media and digital culture inform the work of artists such as Nam June Paik and Rafaël Rozendaal.

The first decades of the 21st century have seen the growth of Contemporary African art, the revival of figurative painting, the emergence of street art and the rise of NFTs, unique digital artworks that are powered by blockchain technology.

Major Contemporary artists practicing now include Ai Weiwei, Cecily Brown, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Kara Walker.

Find a collection of Contemporary prints, photography, paintings, sculptures and other art on 1stDibs.