The first retrospective on Liliana Cano at the Nivola Museum in Orani (Nuoro).

The Nivola Museum in Orani (Nuoro) is hosting from Feb. 27 to April 3 the first retrospective dedicated to Liliana Cano (Gorizia, 1924 - Sassari, 2021), entitled Di Fronte ai tuoi occhi. The exhibition pays tribute to a painter whose work marked eighty years of artistic life in Sardinia, making painting her reason for living at a time and in a historical context in which such a choice was anything but easy for a woman; to an unconventional, undisciplined and impetuous figure, but also beloved for her ability to speak to the public with an anti-elitist, immediate and direct language; and above all to an artist who through figuration exalted the power of painting, with images with an intense emotional charge.

The exhibition does not present the public with a comprehensive reconstruction of the artist’s long career, but rather aims to offer a useful key to understanding the meaning of a work that in its deliberate simplicity can risk being viewed superficially, and sometimes has been. Central to Liliana Cano’s work is the idea of a femininity that is neither submissive nor quiet, but affirmative and proudly self-aware.

The female figure is the protagonist of her work: we find her in the many portraits between the 1960s and 1980s that sharply record the fashions and social tics of the period, as in the heroines of classical myth, whose fables are evoked as metaphors for universal feelings and emotions. Paintings such as Two Tigers ( pictured), the Gypsies, but also the Assumption, whose pop-flavored formal aggressiveness and brazen chromatic violence consciously border on Kitsch, could be taken as symbols of his vision of art.

The exhibition is divided into five thematic sections: portraiture, with a focus on family portraits in which the artist’s gaze is colored with a more intimate and private nuance; sociality, with choral scenes of people gathered in convivial moments, at leisure or in street demonstrations; myth, in which Cano’s classical culture and her fascination with the Mediterranean re-emerge; still life, a less frequent theme in her production but no less worthy of interest; and landscape, animated by a panic-driven sense of nature.

Liliana Cano was born in Gorizia to Sardinian parents (her father was an engineer, her mother an elementary schoolteacher and amateur painter; her great-uncle Attilio Nigra was a sculptor) during her childhood she followed her family on various journeys throughout the Peninsula. Having completed her studies at the Accademia Albertina in Turin, she settled with her parents in Sassari after the end of the war. Here he began teaching drawing and came into contact with the local artistic milieu. In 1950 he started his exhibition activity. In 1978 he left Sardinia to move first to Barcelona, then, for eighteen years, to France, subsequently residing in various cities in Provence, until his return to Sassari in 1996.

For all information, you can visit the official website of the Nivola Museum.

The first retrospective on Liliana Cano at the Nivola Museum in Orani (Nuoro).

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