Franco Piruca Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Franco Piruca (1937 - 2000) initially trained in Sicily, in his hometown and then in Rome, where he moved in 1954 and where he experienced a long period of crisis so much so that he abandoned all activities. He resumed his work at the end of the Seventies and immediately played a central role in the rebirth of attention towards figurative painting, thus moving away clearly from abstractionism and the avant-garde. Read the full biography

Franco Piruca (1937 - 2000) initially trained in Sicily, in his hometown and then in Rome, where he moved in 1954 and where he experienced a long period of crisis so much so that he abandoned all activities. He resumed his work at the end of the Seventies and immediately played a central role in the rebirth of attention towards figurative painting, thus moving away clearly from abstractionism and the avant-garde. Starting from 1983 he had participated in all the collective exhibitions curated by Maurizio Calvesi on the theme "Anachronism". He was known not only as a painter, but also as a refined and complex intellectual, for having expressed very original theories on the role of the artist in contemporary society and on the way of understanding art. Piruca has exhibited in several Venice Biennials and his works are present in the rooms of important European and American museums. The artist was a painting teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania for a long time. During a recent exhibition at New York University, entitled Imaginal Realism, his paintings aroused much interest among American critics.