Franz Borghese - The Tin Bird

The painting can be defined as a genre scene, that is, the depiction of an episode of everyday life that, apparently, lacks any significant element. These types of domestic subjects were long considered minor and only began to spread in Western art starting in the 17th century. Only with the development of 19th-century realism did everyday subjects become considered as important as historical or religious ones. The artist Franz Borghese, in his artistic production, reworked the genre scene in a grotesque and caricatural vein. He invented a world populated by wealthy bourgeoisie depicted in a wide variety of poses and situations. The subjects are constructed almost like automatons, with caricatural and simplified forms.

The work's iconography has an ironic, grotesque quality, likely with various allegorical and satirical interpretations. The language used has strong connections to the German New Objectivity artistic movement. It displays the same simplified and infantile interpretation of a realism based on caricature. We find the same cynical nature of painters like George Grosz or Otto Dix in lashing out at their own society with lucid irony. Furthermore, in this painting, we can fully admire the expressive force of Franz Borghese's pictorial style, even from a formal perspective. The brushstrokes are dense and energetic, suited to structurally constructing the figures, characterizing them with an objective volumetric rendering and, at the same time, a vibrant, expressionistic surface. The palette, as usual, focuses on strong, very aggressive colors.

Franz Borghese was a Roman painter born in 1941 and died in 2005. He studied at the Art School on Via di Ripetta, where Turcato, Purificato, and Capogrossi taught. In 1964, he founded the group and magazine "Ferro di Cavallo." He had his first exhibition in 1968. Two years later, in 1970, he began developing his sarcastic style, inspired by Grosz and Dix. His art is a metaphor for a turn-of-the-century bourgeoisie that symbolized human weaknesses.

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