Perché più bruci Leoncillo exhibited at Thaddaeus Ropac in Milan
Thaddaeus Ropac's Milan gallery presents, until 14 November 2026, Perché più bruci, the exhibition devoted to the Italian artist Leoncillo Leonardi, curated by Lorenzo Fiorucci, Alberto Salvadori and Azalea Seratoni: the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery and the opening chapter of a trilogy dedicated to his work, the exhibition marks the beginning of Thaddaeus Ropac's representation of the Fondazione Leoncillo. Alberto Salvadori introduces it to askanews: 'Perché più bruci is the exhibition we created to show, to demonstrate, to bring to light 40 years of Leoncillo's work and production. The thread that connects all the sculptures on show is this great, constant, profound reflection on the body — a body that has a strong bond with nature; indeed, the exhibition includes an extraordinary drawing of olive trunks from the 1930s. So this is an ancestral rootedness in the traditions of an age-old culture, which Leoncillo reinterpreted, deconstructed and reinvented through the constant use of a single material.' Lorenzo Fiorucci continues: 'Terracotta, especially in the Informale period, takes on this visual quality: it becomes bloodied flesh, burnt, cut, tormented flesh, which somehow expresses the existential pain of a restless spirit — but a brilliantly creative one.' And Alberto Salvadori concludes: 'One of the very few, if not the only, twentieth-century Italian artist to have worked exclusively with this medium.'
Bringing together sculptures and works on paper spanning four decades, the exhibition brings out the coherence of the artist's path, uniting the subversive force with which Leoncillo redefined the expressive possibilities of clay, transforming it into one of the most innovative languages of 20th-century sculpture.
Lorenzo Fiorucci finally introduces Colomba of 1952–53: 'This exhibition, thanks to the Fondazione Leoncillo and to Thaddaeus Ropac, has made it possible to recover and fully restore this work, also reactivating what was essentially its original suspension mechanism. This is the only known work by Leoncillo that was conceived to be, in effect, suspended. In 1954 he wrote a letter to Roberto Longhi in which he spoke precisely of this work, saying: "At the end of the 1952 Biennale I developed a new idea, in which the planes become round again, and for the first time I saw this image complete." It is the image of a movement: this is a dove that is moving, conquering space, and colour becomes functional to that movement. This work is truly a turning point — it ideally closes what was the post-Cubist season and sows the seed that would open what would later become the final, naturalist, somehow Informale season. So it really is a piece that is not only unpublished but also a key piece in Leoncillo's own career.'
