About the artist:

Initially Franco Minei was a playwright and man of the theater. He began to paint in a realistic manner in 1944. After studying with Di Chirico and Guttuso he developed a unique form of absurb realism that is essentially theatrical in tone. Minei is one of the Founders of the New Roman School. He emigrated to New York in the 1970s and has had numerous exhibtions throughout the United States, Europe and South American. Currently he divides his time between New York and Cape Cod where several outer cape galleries are featuring his paintings and pastels in the summer of 2002. The great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, collected Minei’s paintings. They found a common bond, a fascination with the satirical; circuses, clowns, traveling acts and a happy boyhood. Once, after one particularly successful show in Rome, a critic cited Minei’s surrealistic social commentary as on par with Picasso and Chagall. Four decades later, Minei is going through a renaissance of sorts. For most of his career, he has worked on large canvasses, but in the past five years he’s turned to pastel. “Sometimes it takes a specter of sad sweetness to show the human condition there is always a satirical view of life or an irony,"says Minei, a founder of the New Roman School of art.”