Image: 67.5 x 51cm; Sheet:100 x 70 cm

'Volti (faces)' by Sandro Chia is an etching and aquatint measuring 100 × 70 cm, produced in 1995. Two abstracted heads occupy the composition in close proximity: the left rendered in flat planes of violet, black, and gold with tightly coiled white-and-black hair; the right a loose red contour drawing set against a grey ground striped with white wavy lines. The contrast between the densely painted left figure and the open, gestural right one is central to the image's structure. Chia was a leading figure of the Transavanguardia — the Italian Neo-Expressionist current that reasserted figuration and mythology against conceptual abstraction in the late 1970s and 1980s. By 1995, his vocabulary of bold outlines, Mediterranean facial types, and layered chromatic planes was well established, and 'Volti' channels that figurative confidence into the more restrained register of printmaking.