ABC-ARTE is pleased to present Tempo Continuo, the first solo exhibition of Gastone Biggi at the gallery's Milan venue, curated by Flaminio Gualdoni.
After the great success of the exhibition Gastone Biggi. La pittura si fa sul serio, presented at the historic Genoa venue in 2025, the most in-depth monographic exhibition ever dedicated to the Roman artist by a gallery, ABC-ARTE brings to Milan, for the first time in many years, a second and distinct chapter of the exhibition project dedicated to Gastone Biggi (Rome, 1925 – Tordenaso di Langhirano, 2014). The exhibition is realised with the invaluable collaboration of the Fondazione Gastone Biggi.
Previously unseen works selected from six fundamental cycles of Biggi's practice: the Continui, the Variabili, the Eventi – Guerra e Pace, the New York series, the Puntocromie, the Fleurs. Not a replica of the Genoese retrospective, but an autonomous and complementary exploration: where the Genoa exhibition offered the broadest and most systematic vision ever realised, the Milan exhibition works through depth, placing cycles distant in time in tension to reveal the underlying coherence of a practice that has constantly renewed itself without ever interrupting.
Gastone Biggi was one of the most rigorous and least easily classifiable figures in Italian art of the second half of the twentieth century. Trained in postwar Rome, through Informale and then the perceptual rigour of Gruppo 1, founded in 1962 with Carrino, Uncini, Frascà, Santoro and Pace, he built a practice that does not follow critical periodisations but obeys the internal logic of an obsession: understanding what colour does to light, and what light does to time. As Piero Dorazio wrote in 1967, in the phrase that became the title of the Genoa exhibition, «la pittura si fa sul serio», and in Biggi this seriousness was never an attitude, but a method.
The Continui of the 1960s reveal a Biggi who has just left Informale and chooses to reflect on the pure rhythm of the mark, abolishing colour, working in black and white with an almost ascetic discipline, close to music, Bach in particular, whom Biggi loved and studied. The Variabili mark the return to colour in its disciform freedom, developed through European travels in the 1970s. The works of the New York series, made on sanded canvases with collage inserts, the result of four American trips between 1989 and 2006, are among the most powerful works in Biggi's corpus: the city as visual trauma and desire, the harshness of the suburbs and the splendour of Manhattan translated into dense, almost physical painterly matter. The Eventi – Guerra e Pace present painting as a political and moral act, belonging to the series Biggi considered the maturation of his Abstract Realism, theorised in the Manifesto of 2005. The Puntocromie, shown for the first time at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, mark a moment of synthesis: the point as the minimal unit of colour, the surface as a system of relations. The Fleurs close the journey with a lightness that is hard-won, not decorative but conceptual, where Biggi brings Abstract Realism to its final and most luminous consequences.
The Milan exhibition is an invitation addressed in particular to the collectors and public of the city who were unable to follow the Genoese chapter: an opportunity to encounter an artist whom Milan has hosted and loved, Biggi lived and worked in the city in the early 1990s, frequenting Rodolfo Aricò, Walter Valentini, Mario Raciti, Claudio Olivieri, and who deserves a permanent place in Milan's critical and collecting memory.
Tempo Continuo will be on view from 4 June to 12 September 2026 at ABC-ARTE ONE OF, via Santa Croce 21, Milan. The opening will take place on Thursday 4 June from 18:30.
