Ken's Gallery Florence

Giampaolo Talani - "A summer night"
oil on wood - cm. 100x100 - 1996

Countless artists have exhibited here and mentioning only a few of them would to be unfair to many others; this is partly because such a panorama is not limited to the many Florentine, Italian, European and American artists of success today and partly because Walter Bellini already believed in multimedial art long before anyone else even thought about interactivity (by alternating exhibitions of paintings, sculpture, ceramics and other arts in his Gallery), as well as bringing up the question of how to make art works multicultural; in fact in the early eighties he was already saying that the work of art has no limits and no idealogical or linguistic barriers because it is made up of so many different marks, tones, shades and variations of colour that combined together become a universally recognizable expression, as they are almost impossible to describe in words.

The Gallery was founded in May 1980 on the basis of the extremely daring idea of only exhibiting unknown and new work, in other words, the various artistic styles that are the true expression of our times. Actually contemporary art today is a formal "communication between nations, the way they live, their "identity" and their desires". This was no easy job in Florence, which was dominated by "Macchiaioli" or Italian Impressionist painting and where introducing anything new could mean, apart from the real risk of failure, serious economic and business losses. This however did not deter the Gallery's Director, Walter Bellini, who, spurred on by the desire to lay the foundations of a consistent and creative relationship between the past and present in Florence, ancient cradle of the arts, decided to opt for the present in Florentine art; by doing this, he not only went completely against the stream but also clearly kept to his main objective, which was that of not simply showing the work of contemporary artists but of concentrating instead on living contemporary artists alone.

Luca Marietti - "The spirit of the times"
mixed tecnique on hardboard, cm.100x100