Stone Hut and Maize

This work was purchased at the exhibition devoted to Piero Giunni and mounted at the Milan Società Per le Belle Arti ed Esposizione Permanente in 1990. It belongs to a group that includes a further five works by the artist, Light Field, Green Summer, Wheat, Wheat and Bright Season. It depicts a few cobs of ochre maize painted against a dark wall of sketchy blocks of stone. The canvas was painted late in Giunni’s career. The artist studied with Achille Funi, Carlo Carrà and Aldo Carpi at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Through the critic Francesco Arcangeli, for whom he remained “one of the last naturalists”, in the 1950s Piero Giunni approached Informel and in particular the work of Nicholas de Staël and Serge Poliakoff. The natural element always features in the artist’s painting, as it does in that of Ennio Morlotti, Alfredo Chigine and Sergio Romiti. Throughout his long career he continued to represent reality, though he transfigured it, constantly choosing to paint the Po Valley landscape and the Trentino mountains. This approach was similar in certain respects to that of Cristoforo de Amicis, as is evident in his Landscape.