Our mission is to promote the work and preserve the legacy of one of the world’s most unique abstract painters of the twentieth century. Our aim is to accomplish those goals by preserving the documents and collection of resources related to Gian Berto Vanni’s work and by supporting the intercultural aspects associated with his art.
By providing an accurate and reliable record of Vanni's work, which spanned more than seventy years, we seek to promote a deeper appreciation of his artistic sensibility as well as an informed discussion of his many accomplishments.

The Gian Berto Vanni Art Estate that has curated this site is managed by Ruggero Vanni and Valentina Puccioni.
Ruggero Vanni is the son of the artist, and an artist in his own right. He has been following and assisting his father with managing and cataloging his work throughout his whole life. Since his father passed away, he has been working in preserving his legacy and organizing his art, writing, and documents.
Valentina Puccioni has a Masters in Contemporary Art History from the University of Siena, Italy. She wrote her Master’s Thesis on the life and work of Gian Berto Vanni, supervised by Professor Enrico Crispolti, one of the most prominent art critics of Italian contemporary art. Valentina is the owner/director of Arco Gallery. She represents European and American artists. both modern and contemporary.

While every attempt is made to include accurate and factual information, the Gian Berto Vanni Art Estate is not responsible for the accuracy or inaccuracy of any statements or documents found on this site. This site is not intended to, nor should it be deemed to, create any contractual rights or obligations of any kind. This site provides general guidance and information only, and may be revised, amended, modified or terminated by the Gian Berto Vanni Art Estate at its sole discretion, without notice, at any time.

Our memory stores the emotions and dreams that become the building bricks of our work. They are the essence of what surrounds us, an understanding of the universal rhythms of nature: a tree, a rock, a splash of paint, a procession of ants - they follow the rules of gravity, dynamics, attraction, repulsion - we create images that represent a more intimate way to look at reality - if we follow the universal laws that drive planets, emotions, visions, remembrances reassembled in different ways guided by associations caused by our inner self, different from the original building stone, but intimately connected to them.

A painting... to follow your path as though you had been going there before; to climb following your inner compass without even knowing if you have one; to levitate without any mystical help, supported only by the arms of dreams that don’t need sleep to make you understand, to look through things and see other ones behind, and their opposite; and accept that they are not a symbol, but acceptation and denial that you have always known, tearing their veils apart, and every veil is of a different color, and is your mirror at the same time, yours and of the others, for you, for all to understand that nothing has to be understood...

Gian Berto Vanni was born in Rome, Italy in 1927. He studied with painter-philosopher Alberto Bragaglia in Rome. In 1949 he was awarded a painting scholarship by the Dutch government to study in Holland with De Stijl artist Vordemberge-Gildewart. In 1952 he was awarded a Fullbright Scholarship to study with artist and historic color theorist Joseph Albers at Yale University in New Haven. He has been in Paris, France in the 50s; in Rome, Italy, in the 60s; and in New York City since the end of the 70s. He has been teaching color theory at Cooper Union for 30 years. His work has been shown in galleries in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Gian Berto Vanni’s work is characterized by an ambiguity of interpretation expressed through spatial, temporal, formal, and iconological contradictions. For him, these represent a reflection of real life, with realities that are extremely different from each other and which relate to different and yet equally valid systems of logic. Memory is the point of decantation, where past and present coexist, making all sorts of formulations possible.

His canvases express this multiplicity, in their macroscopic and microscopic elements, which are plumbed, dissected and reassembled into metamorphic structures. Agates become amoebas, which merge in an aquatic veil, destined to crack like parched earth. Or there might occur an opposite, generative process, whereby cells are created, like knots in wood, from accidents of the flow, and multiply invading the surrounding fields.

The field itself is often bordered by the presence of a frame as to separate the internal space of the painting from the external space. After having established this boundary, Vanni crosses it with elements from the internal space of the canvas. This intervention negates the frame’s function and overturns its meaning, to express the ambiguity of the painting’s physical limits.

Vanni thus creates situations where it is impossible to complete any logical path. This reveals an underlying subject of many of his works: the non-acceptance of reality as it appears.