Nathaniel Mary Quinn: Split Face

Challenging the canon of beauty that dominated portraiture until the 19th century, the works of Nathaniel Mary Quinn (Chicago, 1977) follow the path opened by the great artists of the 20th century, including Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon, freely interpreting the human figure, composition, and balance of forms through a non-academic pictorial language—at times grotesque, almost monstrous, and unsettling.

In homage to Split Face, his first solo exhibition in Italy, presented in Florence across the Museo Stefano Bardini and the Museo Novecento, this volume brings together a selection of portraits displayed alongside works by Renaissance and 20th-century masters such as Donatello, Pollaiolo, the Della Robbia family, as well as Virgilio Guidi, Marino Marini, Antonietta Raphaël Mafai, and many others.

Texts by Sergio Risaliti, Carlo Francini; conversation with Stefania Rispoli