The artistic career of Gino De Dominicis can be clearly split into two separate phases. The first, beginning in the late 1960s and lasting until the early 1980s, is characterized by intense performative activity and ample experimentation: from video to Live Art, from installation to sculpture. The second focuses instead exclusively on highly original figurative painting, starting precisely from his self-portrait entitled "Io a Roma" (1986) owned by the Foundation.
In his earlier period De Dominicis adopted a practice that culminated in the controversial installation entitled “Seconda soluzione d’immortalità l’universo è immobile” that he presented at the 1972 Venice Biennale. The work is accompanied by a letter dealing with immortality, a question that interested him enormously and drove him to study the figure of Gilgamesh and the Sumerian era.
Influences on his painting were varied and many, from Renaissance art to Iconography. A varied and inverse use of perspective and the relationship between the visible and invisible is emblematic of his work, together with esoteric evocations and the halo of magic and mystery that enshrouds the figure of De Dominicis himself in myth. Invisibility, magnetism, gravity, and immobility feature in all the artist’s productions, and are accompanied by a constant attention to spectatorship.
