1935
Piero Guccione was born on 5 May in Scicli, in the province of Ragusa, the third child of a middle-class family. His father was a well-trained tailor and his mother a housewife.
1948-49
Thanks to his father's support, he abandoned his classical studies to devote himself to drawing and painting. He attended the Comiso School of Art for a year, then the Art Institute of Catania, where he graduated.
1954
In the autumn of 1954, shortly after his father's death, Guccione moved to Rome. He began to frequent the neorealist painters of the Galleria Il Pincio, in Piazza del Popolo, including Astrologo, Attardi and Vespignani.
1958-59
He agreed to take part in the first palaeontological mission to the Libyan Sahara, led by Fabrizio Mori, an experience he repeated until 1969. The aim of these missions was to survey life-size rock paintings and graffiti from prehistoric Saharan civilisations.
1960
In April 1960, Guccione inaugurated his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Elmo in Rome, presented by art critic Duilio Morosini.
1961
In 1961, Guccione began frequenting the neo-figurative group Il pro e il contro (The Pros and Cons), formed by painters Attardi, Calabria, Farulli, Gianquinto, Vespignani and critics Del Guercio, Micacchi and Morosini, from whom he would distance himself in 1964.
1966
In 1966, at the age of thirty-one, he participated for the first time in the Venice Biennale, where he would also be invited in 1972, 1978, 1982, 1988 and 2011.
1969
In 1969, he built a summer house between Punta Corvo and Sampieri Bay, on the easternmost tip of Sicily. The poetic beauty of Sicilian light became increasingly essential to Guccione's eyes.
1979
In 1979, he returned permanently to Sicily, settling in Quartarella on the Modica plateau. He spent the rest of his life in his home-studio, where he painted his famous seas, dense with lyrical metaphysics, his pastels of neo-Leopardian boundlessness, and his poetic d'après.
1981
Together with painter and close friend Franco Sarnari, he became a leading figure in the Scicli Group, which held its first collective exhibition at the La Tavolozza Gallery in Palermo. Painter Renato Guttuso, who visited the exhibition, was the first to coin the name of the Group.
1985
At the end of the 1970s, he achieved his first personal successes abroad, particularly in Paris and the United States.
In 1985, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York presented an anthology of his graphic works.
1988
The Venice Biennale, in the Italian Pavilion, pays tribute to him with a personal room where his large painting Last Sea is exhibited.
He is a finalist - along with Burri, Schifano and Perez - for the Artist of the Year award in Naples, promoted by 120 Italian critics.
1995
In 1995, Guccione was appointed Academician of San Luca.
In 1999, he received the Special Prize for Culture from the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, together with Riccardo Muti and Rita Levi Montalcini.
2000
Il Cigno GG Edizioni in Rome has published a new edition of Galileo Galilei's original work Discorsi intorno a due Nuove Scienze (Discourses on Two New Sciences), with a preface by His Holiness John Paul II and illustrated with ten engravings by Piero Guccione.
2004
On 14 December, he received the Gold Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic from Carlo Azeglio Ciampi for his services to art and culture.
2018
On 5 May 2018, his 83rd birthday, the Piero Guccione Archive was established, chaired by his daughter Paola.
A few months later, on 6 October 2018, Piero Guccione passed away in his beloved home-studio in Quartarella in the Modica countryside.
Piero Guccione on Sampieri beach (1999) by Luigi NifosiPiero Guccione Archive
For me, the need is first and foremost to find a way to express a passion for life; I express my passion for life through this medium, which is painting. — Piero Guccione
Photo credit: Alfio Di Bella, Manuel Gualandi, Luigi Nifosì, Archivio Piero Guccione
© 2025 by SIAE for the artworks of Piero Guccione
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