The sumptuous canvases of Italian realist painter Domenico Gnoli (1933–1970) lend gravity to obscure details of everyday objects and scenarios. Lingering over the scalloped hem of a blouse, the knot of a necktie, or a groomed hairline, Gnoli captured the mannerisms of postwar Italy. His uncanny style brings together a disenchanted gaze and a fetishism for craftmanship and adornment. He tightly cropped his subjects, often capturing them so vividly as to render them abstract. Gnoli mixed sand and marble debris into his pigments, giving his paintings a texture that contradicts their clean illusionism. The encrusted surfaces suggest the quality of fresco, recalling the traditions of fifteenth-century Italy. Eschewing the doctrines of abstraction, Pop, and Conceptualism, Gnoli’s work was in its time boldly anachronistic.

Gnoli’s life was brief but prolific. Born in Rome to a ceramicist and an art historian, he spent his early years between the capital and Spoleto. At 16, he began studying engraving under painter and printmaker Carlo Alberto Petrucci, and two years later Gnoli was exhibiting his work alongside such established artists as Giacomo Manzù and Giorgio Morandi. At 19, he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, but soon left to travel in Paris and London. In his twenties, he spent time in New York; he authored a children’s book that was published by Simon & Schuster, designed scenography for the Old Vic in London and the Schauspielhaus in Zürich, and worked as an illustrator for such publications as Sports Illustrated, Life, and Horizons. He married sculptor Yannick Vu in 1963, and they lived between Majorca and Rome. In 1968, Gnoli’s work was included in Documenta IV in Kassel, Germany and the Venice Biennale, as well as exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover. Two years later he died of cancer at the age of 36, just three months after his enthusiastically received first exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. He developed his signature style of painting in the decade before his New York debut, and created only about 140 works during this mature period. Posthumously, he garnered widespread acclaim. In 2021, Fondazione Prada in Milan organized a major retrospective dedicated to Gnoli’s work.