VINICIO BERTI In this room, used as a conference room, a series of ten works are exhibited by the Florentine artist Vinicio Berti, who died in 1991. The paintings come from a donation made by his heiress Maria Pia Liberia Pini to the City of Prato in 2007 with the condition that they be exhibited in a place open to the public. The ten paintings are created using mixed media, oil or acrylic on canvas, plywood or wood fibre panels, sometimes also with the use of collage. They have particularly bright colours emerging from the thick lines drawn mostly in black brushstrokes and are arranged in chronological order, illustrating the evolution of Berti's painting style. The first of these works, entitled “New Reality”, is an example of non-figurative art: green, orange, white and black lines are grouped in diagonals and intertwined as if to form a type of weave. This painting dates from 1950, the year the artist collaborated on the publication of the “Manifesto of Classical Abstractionism”. After that moment, he began his phase of reconstruction within Abstractionism, incorporating the dimension of contemporaneity into his works, also with a condemnatory tone. An example of this is “AHHH”, one of the paintings inspired by the Hiroshima tragedy. In this work, the letter “A” for Atom and the three “H's” for Hydrogen, in thick red brushstrokes against a yellow background and appearing to be gripped in a black and white toothed vice, are rendered as the expression of an “atomic scream”. Later, in the 1980s, Berti devoted himself to the ‘Looking Up’ cycle, a sort of spiritual testament where the depiction of buildings dizzily stretching towards the sky arouses the idea of continuous becoming. Exhibited here from that series are “Looking Up (lucidly)”, “Looking Up (laboriously)” and “Looking Up (grandly)”, painted solely with black and white lines.