Luciano Ventrone is regarded by the Italian art establishment, museums, curators and critics as one of the leading exponents of his genre, and is widely celebrated as the best Italian hyper-realist painter and successor of pittura metafisica. Luciano Ventrone was born in Rome in 1942, and passed away in 2021. His biography gives us great insight to his artistic practice and influence in his work.

Ventrone was born during the “great carnage,” and his childhood was marked by the tragedy of war. Separated from his home at the age of five, he was sent to live in Denmark with Lady Metha Peterson, who gave him his first toy; a box of paints, and his first impression of art. He later returned to Italy to support his family, but followed his passion for painting by attending L’Academia Belle Arti Di Roma in 1960, and studying architecture in 1968. As a member of the student protests he left school and dedicated his life to painting. He dabbled in almost all artistic currents and styles, as a means for nourishing and developing his own artistic language. Ventrone took his influence from Caravaggio, and Giorgio Morandi, and was a direct student of Giuseppe Capogrossi. His solitary approach and artistic vocation attributes to this extremely rigorous discipline, and thoroughness in his study of colour and form. His life drawings were published in the Academic book Human Anatomy – the central nervous system, by Prof Gastone Lambertini. Living in Italy between the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, the artist spends twelve hours a day in his studio working on his compositions. The turning point in Ventrone’s art career was when Frederico Zeri, the great art scholar, knocked on his studio door in 1983. Ventrone had already exhibited in the most prestigious London art gallery, Wildenstein, and after Zeri’s visit, he was presented in Tokyo as well. With the support of the most prolific art historians and critics, Achille Bonito Oliva, and Edward Lucie-Smith, Ventrone became established as a significant contemporary artist of his generation. From 1991 to the present, there have been many solo and group exhibitions of this artist, both in private and public galleries and collections. Ventrone is widely established in Italy as well as internationally, from Europe to Asia to the United States and Canada: being represented in London with Albemarle Gallery, Galleria Mucciaccia in Rome, Hollis Taggart Galleries in New York, and Han Art Gallery in Montreal.