Franco Sarnari, co-founder of Gruppo di Scicli, dies at 89

Franco Sarnari, the Italian painter who co-founded the Gruppo di Scicli with Piero Guccione in the 1980s, has died at 89 in his home in Scicli, Ragusa. Born in Rome in 1933, he was a friend of Mario Schifano and Renato Guttuso. In the 1960s he helped found the collective Il Girasole in Rome. In 1970 he had a major retrospective at Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, and in 1988 he had a solo room in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He moved to Scicli in the early 1970s, living in the Gerrantini district. His work is known for aesthetic rigor, notably the Cancellazioni series where he intervened on historical artworks, as well as the Frammenti and Neri series. He was followed by critics Lorenza Trucchi and Giovanni Carandente. In 2013 Marco Goldin included him among the major figures of global abstraction in Vicenza, and he had a retrospective at the National Gallery of Washington curated by David Gariff. In 2021 he began work with his children on the Archivio Franco Sarnari, inaugurated in April 2022 with a show about his life and art.