Rabbit for Dinner

With a knife in his left hand and a torch in his right, a man chases after a rabbit. The dynamic of this hunting scene is reinforced by intense colours. The composition is a fine example of Sandro Chia’s work, in which he placed relatively large human figures, usually men, in the foreground of mythical or imaginary landscapes. In the 1970s, Chia started to employ exuberant colour and narrative depictions as a reaction against the conceptual art of the 1960s. He was part of the ‘Transavanguardia’ movement, defined in 1979 by art critic Achille Bonito Olivia, who had identified a return to figuration and symbolism in the work of various artists, a development that he recognised as the Italian variant of Neo-Expressionism.