May 10 - From May 15, the Monumental Complex of the Dioscuri at the Quirinale Palace will pay a  tribute to Vittoriana Benini with an exhibition entitled "Vittoriana Benini – The Close Atmosphere of Reality." The event, consisting of about 50 works, offers the general public the opportunity to gain important insights into Benini’s vast and rich painting career and admire closely the work of an artist who achieved a prominent role in the Italian and international contemporary art circles. Painter and sculptor of strong sensitivity, but also graphic designer, Benini has an uncommon talent that allowed her to interpret traditional values developing a language of her own. Her art, via her subjects and pictorial techniques, is able to express feelings and emotions that find their own space between everyday life and memory. In this context, the Quirinal exposition is a showcase of dreams in which the artist's painting, characterized by rich colors of tonal vibrations, but still gentle, soft and amiable to the observer. Her perception of childhood, expanded on a figurative universal scale, captures the entire building. Benini began to draw and paint at a very young age, and she finally reaches success with the 1997 exhibition “Women and Dolls,” held at the prestigious Feirligh Dickinson University in the United States, and the following year in Arkansas, Hot Spring Art Foundation. In 2000, the artist began a new path "between dream and reality" and "the theater of life," in which she alternate street performers with clowns and circus characters. To these themes she soon adds another, "old postcards," pictorial representations that link the past to the present through real characters and dream. Her continuous quest for new frontiers brings her, in 2008, to explore three-dimensionality with volumes, lights and architecture. Meanwhile, in the United States her reputation grew, recording great success with audiences and critics at the show in Texas. Also significant was the success of the exhibition at the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt and the following year at Palazzo Barberini. After yet another exhibition in Texas, in 2010, her works are portrayed at Admo in the Palazzo Ducale of Sassuolo.

WHO IS VITTORIANA BENINI

Born in Imola in 1941, Benini begins drawing and painting at a young age. In the '70s, after mastering technical and freehand drawing, she enrolled in the "School of Arts and Crafts" and of Massalombarda and at the '"Accademia di Belle Arti" in Ravenna, where she was a student of Folli, De Grada, Spadoni, Zancanaro and Caldari, and devoted herself to the study of the human body and especially the female figure. In addition to Massalombarda and Ravenna, the artist continued to socialize with the Imola artistic circles, composed of Amleto Montevecchi, Tommaso Della Volpe and Anacleto Margotti, as well as Rossi, Ruffini and Gottarelli, who gave her the open-mindedness to grow. After teaching for a while, Benini begins a career in advertising graphics. In the '80s, she however decides to take a break and combine her preexisting subjective inspiration with her academic background. And it is throughout the ‘90s that she attributes to women the main role in her art, expressing the inner strength of the gender condition, which, as written by Vittorio Sgarbi, "is the condition of women in history, a history that is made not of fighting, not of war making, but through the construction and education of children." Next to the female figure, Benini puts a doll. This is an important cycle of works because it reflected the artist's ability to paint with intimate detail and considerable intensity.