Every form of art sinks its roots also into the memory. Gina Lollobrigida demonstrates this with such absolute passion, harmony and color that the energies of the past can be clearly perceived, a strong emotion that is both captivating and sweetly bewitching.

Gina Lollobrigida: a Leading Figure in Italian Culture
by Irina Antonova
Director of the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

The artistic vision of Gina Lollobrigida the artist is akin to that of such masters of contemporary sculpture as Manzù, Greco and Messina. Within the context of contemporary Italian art, these figures belong in the mainstream of tradition, and Gina Lollobrigida has shown unquestionable courage in systematically producing traditional works of a naturalistic type at a time when extreme forms of avant-garde art are all the rage. The plastic structure of her works is characterized by simplicity, grounded on a constant striving to shatter the static nature of the material and endow the forms in space with movement through composition. This is particularly evident in the works where the artist addresses the theme of dance, in the densely expressive contrast between the powerful and elegant outlines of the figures and the gossamer material of their garments fluttering in the breeze. At the same time, however, her static compositions (portraits and reclining figures) always display a sort of subterranean interior dynamic.

The Power and Substance of an extraordinary art
by George S. Bolge
Director of Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida

Her work embraces two worlds and her characteristic output bears the mark of their collision. To grasp the full significance of her sculpture, one must identify the ways in which the artist combined the heritage of one world with the particular pressures of the other, and thus converted a potentially disrupted history into art of remarkable originality, substance and strength.

Gina’s Enchanted Looking Glass
by Maurizio Calvesi
Università La Sapienza, Rome

Living Together (the work exhibited in Seville) displays the other side of the natural and therefore simple but deep and intense play of Gina’s feelings: sorrow at the contemplation of suffering juxtaposed with a constantly renewed joie de vivre. All or at least many of her sculptures have this dynamic impetus, as manifested to the highest degree in the great Esmeralda of 2000, five meter high.

The child dandled by the naked mother stretched out on a piece of fabric is a display of bravura in the harmonious rendering of form. Even in this case, there is nothing static but instead a dynamic impetus of line and gesture animated by feelings of complete happiness.

And this is expressed with particular finesse and intensity in the portrait of Marilyn Monroe, an actress (a rival?) that Gina knew and spent time with, linked by mutual liking and sympathy, while perhaps being more aware Marilyn delicate “fragility” in hindsight.

Giving Life to a dream
by Michel Nurisdany
Art Critic at Le Figaro, Paris

Her polychromatic sculptures form part of an unbroken tradition that runs from Greek statuary to the Middle Ages and takes in Aztec sculpture as well as the art of Africa and Oceania. But here the warmth of gold is accorded neither to God nor to the gods nor even to princes, but to the sensuality of a star. It weds her curves and underscores her radiant splendor: Dazzling Gina!

What she has achieved in these works is the reconciliation of two dreams, the dream of showbiz and the dream of art, through bronze sculpture that hides beneath its patina and is embellished with gold and color.

She is here twice over, as artist and as model, recognizable in her roles, recognizable in her style. Cinema of the golden age and gilded sculpture, so to speak.

A moment of Truth
by Pierre Restany
Art Critic

She made us dream and we French people, dreamed particularly, watching Notre-Dame de Paris and Fanfan la Tulipe. Gina represented the ideal of Mediterranean beauty, ardent and wild, an emotional temperament translating the weight of her deep humanity. It was Vittorio De Sica to take her away from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, to immerse her into the universe of movies. And now, after a long and glorious career, Gina Lollobrigida returns to her juvenile vocation, sculpture, at the end of al long, vital experience leading her own identification in the three-dimensional bronze, in the most specific characters Gina Has incarnated on the screen. It is here, in the her sculpture, “la Gina” just as movies have made her, and here she has found the truth of her being. And this truth is the one of her world, the “World for children”: a world of purity and youth, a world of love and generosity in life, the great family of Esmeralda. Gina Lollobrigida’s beauty made us dream watching her movies and her sculpture illustrates our dreams in a popular reality filled with youth and love for life: the conclusion of an artistic destiny in a moment of truth.