The son of an important middle-class family from Como, in the early 1950s, Luca Scacchi Gracco embarked on an unstoppable career as a traveller and adventurer, a career that introduced him to European art, but also to the lands of the Middle East and Africa.

Shuttling between Italy and the rest of the world made him an astute connoisseur of popular art and allowed him to promote some of the most important European artists in our country. At the same time, he was working as a painter, initially focusing on informal post-World War II research and soon becoming an original interpreter of abstract art.

In the exhibition that the Mart in Rovereto is dedicating to his work, there is a collection of documents relating to his career as an art dealer, an early broker for Italy for the works of Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, George Groz, Emil Nolde and Otto Dix, as well as the owner of the Studio d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan.

A selection of paintings accompanies the documents. Scacchi Gracco s large canvases bear witness to a research based on a complex interweaving of planes and forms that make ancient alphabets abstract - perhaps reminiscent of Middle Eastern experiences - and at the same time evoke futuristic models.