Domenico Gnoli

Domenico Gnoli’s paintings celebrate the details of everyday life, exploring new perspectives through tightly cropped compositions that push towards abstraction. Born in 1933 in Rome into an artistic family — his father Umberto Gnoli was an art critic and historian and his mother, Yvonne Bake, was a painter — Gnoli was immersed in the arts from an early age. He studied stage design at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome.

In the formative years of his career, Gnoli worked as a theatre set designer and illustrator for magazines such as Vogue, Fortune and Sports Illustrated. It was only during the last half-decade of his life that Gnoli developed what would become his signature painting style. His work is marked by a hyper-realistic approach that often focuses on mundane details of ordinary life. Rather than portraying entire scenes or figures, he zoomed in on particular elements, such as hair, fabric textures or shoes, rendering them with an almost obsessive precision. This unique perspective imbued his subjects with a monumental and sometimes surreal quality, elevating the ordinary to the extraordinary.

The link with Surrealism is pertinent. The atmosphere Gnoli created in his paintings recalls the ‘metaphysical painting’ style of Giorgio de Chirico. The level of detail when depicting textile in his works highlights Gnoli’s affinity to both the aesthetic and the craft of the Old Masters. Painting mostly during the 1960s, Gnoli’s work has been associated with the Pop art movement in its exploration of material consumerism following the post-war prosperity.

In 1970 Gnoli died of cancer in New York at the age of 36. Despite his short career, the artist created many mature and exceptional works that still attract international attention today. In 2014 Christie’s sold his 1969 painting Black Hair for £7,026,500 — a world auction record for the artist.