What are the opening hours?

Monday 10am - 6pm Tuesday 10am - 6pm Wednesday 10am - 6pm Thursday 10am - 6pm Friday 10am - 6pm

http://www.laocoongallery.co.uk/

Laocoon Gallery, 2a-4 Ryder Street, London (2026)

07/07/2021

Leoncillo Leonardi
1915 - 1968
Plate with fish
c1950
Glazed terracotta
21.6 × 15.5 × 5 cm
His dishes using animals as their subject matter represent some of the most interesting results of Leoncillo's neocubist phase, which can be placed approximately between the end of the 1940s and the middle of the following decade, before his aniconic turn. Belonging to the genre of applied arts, normally relegated to a position of inferior artistic dignity, in Leoncillo instead they show some of the most interesting responses to the inevitable confrontation with Picasso.
This plate is known to us in a second variant, kept in a private collection, identical in shape but with a different distribution of colours. It is therefore conceivable that the sculptor derived this type of production from moulded forms, but only in a small number. A photograph that immortalises him in his Roman studio also seems to suggest this, showing identical pairs of plates, decorated with depictions of animals, hanging on the wall in the distance.

20/10/2020

Meet Laocoon Gallery director Monica Cardarelli as she speaks about her life as an art dealer an this month's Antiques Trade Gazette
Article by

13/10/2020

COMING SOON
14th October @ 4.30pm
Gallery Director Marco Fabio Apolloni joins up with our friends to talk about Marisa Mori in a panel discussion about 500 years of women artists
Link in bio for free registration to this fascinating event!

26/08/2020

LEONCILLO LEONARDI
The Dog
1955
Tempera and charcoal on paper
350x495 cm

Happy international dog day!

25/08/2020

GINO SEVERINI
Silvano
1939
Indian ink on paper
60x48 cm

An ancient Roman deity who presided over the wilds, akin to Faunus, Silvano was considered the god of the woods and the countryside, and the protector of flocks and property. Severini depicts him according to the Roman iconography, sickle in hand and dog beside him, surrounded by an abundant harvest of fruits. The panel is, in the arrangement designed for the monumental fountain at the entrance of Palazzo degli Uffici, the counterpart of Flora; with one placed on either side of the central scene which faces the palace, where Time, or Saturn, is shown, a male figure winged with scythe and hourglass, placed in the middle of the four seasons. As is the case with Flora, the author takes advantage of the countryside theme to set up, largely at the feet of the male n**e, a still life full of details and hunting trophies that directly refer to his long pictorial exercise of the fourth decade, in which classically inspired still lifes – sometimes associated with masks and ancient female statues – predominated over any other subject. These bucolic and pastoral motifs were evidently very welcome in the society of the time, as displayed by Gio Ponti in Paris, in 1937, with his adornment of a dining room for the International Exhibition of Decorative Art, and later, in 1940, in the panels executed for Villa Innocenti in Frascati, with its figures of Pomona and Vertunno very close to the mosaics of the EUR.
Of all the figurations performed for the fountain, the panels of Flora and Silvano certainly appear to be the happiest and the least constricted by the need to adhere, albeit in Gino Severini’s trademark sober manner, to the celebratory spirit that animated the entire conception of the work conceived by the architect Minnucci. Although the letters preserved in the archives record the artist's substantial dissatisfaction with the limited scope of the assignment, he certainly did not object to the revival, in a contemporary key, of the ancient technique of bichrome mosaic. A method that presented an abundance of conceptual affinities with the graphic synthesis elaborated by Cubism.

24/08/2020

***** NEW ARRIVAL *****
LEONCILLO
Tavolo
Glazed ceramic with original glass tabletop
79x194x93cm

21/08/2020

ANDREA SPADINI
Sailing Monkeys
1956
Glazed ceramic
22x34x9 cm

A monkey, adored and fondled like a beloved wife who is allowed her whims and oddities, was the only and special companion of Lanfranco, the last Count Rasponi Dalle Teste. He inherited the title from his father, Nerino, but more significantly a substantial fortune from his mother, American billionaire of Tennesee, Caroline Montague. Count Lanfranco (Florence 1914 - Rio de Janeiro 1983) was a unique figure in public relations, a ‘man of the world’ of opera and art who connected Italy to the United States. Author of the work The Last Prima Donnas, and of The International Nomads, he was a friend of the Kennedys, Grace Kelly, Elsa Maxwell and Van Day Treux, and among other things, owner of one of the most fashionable clubs in New York, the Colony as well as the Sagittarius Art Gallery, also in New York.
He came into contact with Andrea Spadini in Rome, through Gaspero del Corso and Irene Brin, owners of the Obelisk Gallery, on the occasion of his Christmas exhibition of ‘I Gatti’ in 1952, where the artist exhibited a collection of witty ceramic sculptures of cats on top of obelisks.
An unparalleled and pervasively knowledgeable connoisseur of animals, veteran of the vast commission of decoration of Villa Cicogna in Venice, where it is still possible to admire his magnificent creations, Andrea Spadini would become the interpreter of the extravagant dreams of the Count Lanfranco, enabling him to see his beloved monkey immortalised in ceramic and multiplied in his various poses. Thus were born the hilarious sailing monkeys, the funny dancing monkeys and the comical monkeys on the obelisk. The first of these series’, presented by Laocoon Gallery for London Art Week 2020, features four black, shiny monkeys in the act of rowing, each sitting in a white canoe, with an oar in their hands. The canoes are filled with exotic fruits: most notably pineapples and bananas, all of which are cleverly controlled by the long tail of a monkey.

16/08/2020

ANDREA SPADINI
Leda and the swan
1958
Glazed ceramic
80x52x27

In 1958, Alberto Fabiani (Rome 1910 – Cetona 1987) and Simonetta Colonna Romano di Cesarò (Rome 1922 - 2011), both renowned designers, commissioned Andrea Spadini to create four large sculptures to be placed in the garden of their Roman villa on the ancient Appian Way. The pieces were around two metres high and were carved in Vicenza stone, a light coloured and ductile material that hardens over time and was already renowned in Rome due to its use by famous architect Andrea Palladio.
The four sculptures are mythological transfigurations of each member of the Fabiani family; with Leda and the Swan featuring Simonetta, first-born daughter Verde riding on the wing of a bird as Aether, the young Bardo Fabiani, born from Simonetta's marriage to Alberto, as Eros riding the sun, and finally Alberto himself as an armoured warrior, possibly Mars, Roman god of war and guardian of agriculture.

12/08/2020

MARIO SIRONI
Fighting soldiers
1935
Indian ink and pencil on paper
460x540mm

This piece has the appearance of a study from ancient times, with the artist starting from a bas-relief whose source has not been identified. During the mid-1940s Sironi assiduously studied ancient elements (Greek, Roman, Byzantine, medieval), trying to uncover a national language spanning the centuries without stylistic interruption. Curiously, his study of ancient times would develop consistently during this period, while it was not found at the time of the first Italian "return to order" in the early 1920s, offering confirmation of the freedom with which Sironi draws on the ancient: not to work with obvious iconography, but to explore its most stratified cultural meanings.

10/08/2020

VITTORIO GRASSI
Remembrance festival of the proclamation of Italy
1910
Oil on canvas
200x96cm

The artist portrays an ancient sculptural group which is famous for its continued dominance of Rome’s urban landscape throughout its vast history, the Quirinal Dioscuri. In Grassi’s sketch Pollux appears, with twin brother Castor in a mirrored position to his side. Beneath them lies the description of the event for which the image was used, the 1911 Remembrance festivals of the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy.
On the bases of the colossal marble statues, set opposite the Palazzo del Qurinale and overlooking the eternal city from atop the hill with the same name, the inscriptions ‘opus Fidiae’ and ‘opus Praxitelis’ can still be seen, recognising the bronze group made by the great Phideas and his contemporary Praxiteles. According to the reinterpretation of the writings of Pliny the Elder which was proposed by P. Moreno (Nat. Hist. 34.54), the original depiction of the Dioscuri was brought to Rome by Emilio Paulo, victor in the Third Macedonian War in 168 B.C., to be exhibited in Campo Marzio. The marble replica at Piazza del Qurinale is dated to the age of Septimus Severus, and originally adorned the temple of Hercules and Bacchus, alluding to the harmony of the future Princes Caracalla and Gaeta. The statues would later decorate the baths of Constantine on the same hill, where they remained a topographic and symbolic reference point in the countless depictions of the city produced since the Renaissance. The current composition is due in part to the architect Domenico Fontana, who in 1586, at the behest of Pope Sixtus V, freed the area from the ruins of the thermal building and placed the Dioscuri in the centre of a fountain. In 1786, Pius VI commissioned architect Giovanni Antinori to have the fountain removed and to install among the statues an obelisk taken from the Mausoleum of Augustus. This held until 1818, when Pius VII ordered the construction of a new fountain designed by Raffaele Stern, which is what can be seen today.

07/08/2020

LEONCILLO LEONARDI
Siren
1939
Glazed ceramic
62x20x23cm

Siren is an impeccable example of Leoncillo’s exploration of reinterpreting mythical subject matter from a fantastic-expressionist perspective. The mermaid is a theme so widespread in the imagination of nineteenth and twentieth-century artists - including Corrado Cagli, Scipione and Renato Birolli amongst many others – that the identification of specific references becomes almost impossible. In ancient times the Sirens were represented with the body of a bird and a human head, from the 6th century onwards the modern shape with the body of a fish and the bust of a woman was defined. In the case of Leoncillo’s Siren, the bright colours in addition to proximate and coarse shapes allude to an almost animal sensuality, very similar in some ways to that of the Roman Courtesan painted in 1930 by Scipione. Through ceramic sculpture, a technique chosen as his main means of expression, the artist was able to experiment more freely the path to expressionist deformation which, undertaken in the wake of the style of Scipio and the Roman School was moving towards the informal. It is a production which reveals a will of pathos and a suffering tone still influenced by the Roman expressionist scene, and which would find fulfillment in the lacerations of the dark and painful years of the Second World War.

04/08/2020

ACHILLE FUNI
The Parnassus
1948-53
Tempera and gold leaf on panel
212x476cm

Classical mythology was a continuous source of inspiration for Achille Funi in both the field of easel painting and that of wall decoration. A perfect example of this is the theme of the Muses, loved by the artist and replicated in copious different variations; first appearing in the form of the Graces for the fresco Tutte le strade conducono a Roma [all roads lead to Rome] at Palazzo dei Congressi in the EUR district of Rome (1940-1943, unfinished), then subsequently in the wall decorations dedicated to La Commedia dell'arte for the San Marco Cinema in Bergamo (1951-1952) and furthermore in the foyer of the Manzoni Theatre in Milan (1946-1950). The pinnacle of this exploration, however, is surely The Parnassus, a monumental vision painted onto panel by the accomplished frescoist and based on the theme of Apollo and the nine Muses. For the artist, in whose eyes there was no difference between history and myth, between biblical parables and the facts of everyday life, painting was a legitimate means of giving concrete form to the Platonic dream of eternal beauty and overcoming the transience of time. The visionary spirit of the Ferrara master spurred him into painting the ideal of philosophical, statuesque beauty that he embodied in an arcadia of goddess like figures comprising Eve, Venus, Rebecca, Dido, Sappho and especially the Muses.
The mirage of classicism, which allowed him the opportunity to approach the ideal personification of beauty, resulted from an education formed from the study of Homer, Tacitus, Plutarch, Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Ariosto, of the Bible, of the examples of the Greco-Roman statuary, of Pompeian painting and the great Renaissance tradition. Funi said that, "Mythology is truer than history, unless it is Roman history"

Laocoon Gallery

07/07/2021

20/10/2020

13/10/2020

26/08/2020

25/08/2020

24/08/2020

21/08/2020

16/08/2020

12/08/2020

10/08/2020

07/08/2020

04/08/2020

Address

Opening Hours

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Contact The Museum

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Monday	10am - 6pm
Tuesday	10am - 6pm
Wednesday	10am - 6pm
Thursday	10am - 6pm
Friday	10am - 6pm