M.F. Toninelli Art Moderne brings together three artists from the same generation – Winfred Gaul (Düsseldorf, 1928-2003), Larry Rivers (New York, 1923-2002) and Jacques Monory (Paris, 1924-2018) – whose works, from the 1950s-60s onwards, explored the tensions between abstraction, figuration and narrative in a changing world.

Winfred Gaul, a painter-theorist of German informal art, questions painting itself and its ability to represent reality, playing on the relationship between structure and perception. Larry Rivers, an American pioneer of Pop Art, blends scholarly and popular culture in a style of painting that is both expressive and narrative. Jacques Monory, in France, developed a cinematic, monochrome universe imbued with critical distance and visual poetry.

Beyond their aesthetic differences, all three share the same desire to reinvent the pictorial narrative, making the image a space where reality, memory and fiction meet.