Italian painter and engraver Piero Guccione dies at 83

Piero Guccione, a prominent Italian painter and engraver and a leading figure of the 'Scicli group', died on October 2018 at Ospedale Maggiore di Modica in Ragusa province. He was 83. Born in Scicli in 1935, Guccione studied at the Istituto d'arte di Catania and later at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, where he met Renato Guttuso and served as his assistant from 1966 to 1969. In 1961, at the request of the American Federation of Art, he organized a painting exhibition at Columbia University in New York, which later toured major US universities. From the 1980s, his work was shown internationally, including at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington (1984), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1985), two editions of the Quadriennale (1972 and 1992), and several editions of the Venice Biennale (1966, 1972, 1978, 1982, 1988), which dedicated a solo show to him in the Italian Pavilion in 1988. The term 'Scicli group' was coined by Guttuso in a 1981 interview with Il Tempo. Vittorio Sgarbi, who curated Guccione's last two exhibitions in Castellabate and at the Museo di Caltagirone, called him 'the greatest painter of the last 50 years' and praised his synthesis of figurative and abstract painting.