The exhibition arises from the frequentation established between the gallery and Sandro Martini in recent years, following the request to create a work for the birthplace of Amedeo Modigliani; Martini welcomed this initiative with enthusiasm, choosing the Saracura work currently on permanent display in the house-museum.

Sandro Martini, as Luigi Sansone, author of the Catalog Raisonné also writes, "is to be counted among the artists of the last few decades who have contributed to enriching the developments of contemporary painting through the elaboration of an autonomous style and the strength of his own talent. His works are full of meanings, references, states of mind hidden by layers of interweaving of signs and color".

Born in Livorno in 1941: after attending the Art Institutes of Lucca and Florence, he went to Rome where he met Corrado Cagli, Gino Marotta and the most representative artists of the Roman cultural scene. As soon as he finished his studies he moved to Milan where he formed a deep friendship and collaboration with Tancredi and exhibited in the main Milanese galleries, including the Galleria delle Ore, the Galleria Blu, the Galleria del Milione, Studio Marconi: the public exhibition at the Museo Progressivo in Livorno in 1974 should be remembered at that time.

In 1977 he moved to the United States, first to New York, then to San Francisco and the Pacific coast, where he taught two months a year and created his first installations, colossal kites flying towards the sky, large canvases covering places, adorning them, enlivening them.

An important installation was created in 1983 in the shouting hall of the Milan Stock Exchange: for a month the agents shouted their prices under the large canvases stretched from one side of the room to the other. Equally significant is the large installation created in 1999 on the ceiling of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan.

“I never work by improvising”, says the artist, who adds: “I always follow a project, where everything is thought out, with its own why from start to finish. I do a lot of drawings. Then in the moment of realization it's as if I weren't there, it's as if I had the impression that I was watching”.

The works on display cross a bit all the work that Martini has carried out over the years, there will be paintings, mixed techniques and sculptures, including works from the 1960s, such as the large painting "La via del colibrì" and from the 1970s "Bleu purple and desire" and "Blue violet +": works from the same pictorial cycle, are exhibited in the Museum of the City of Livorno.

The exhibition continues with works from the 1990s that are part of the "transcriptions" series, where reference is also made in the titles to the lexicon of other cultures, using mixed media on canvas or lined paper: in addition to enhancing the expressive color of the works, Martini seems to want to underline the cultural and temporal stratifications they contain with sophisticated titles. After these works, from the mid-1990s, Martini conceives the "sewn canvases": in these works fragments of colored canvases are sewn onto the surface, the color black, red and yellow, fragments of fabric and stitching threads merge, giving life to suggestive material compositions.

Particularly suggestive are the two large-format sculptures conceived as an interweaving of glass, Plexiglas, fabrics and ribbons that well summarize the artist's poetics.

As Vittorio Sgarbi writes, "Martini did not think that from the colored and superimposed canvases he would return to the painted picture, he did so by creating an impossible synthesis between installation and painting".