The meeting that Guccione had with Guttuso undoubtedly represented the turning point in his life and career. The Sicilian artist moved to Rome in 1954 to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. Here he meets Guttuso, of whom he will be assistant from 1966 to 1969 for the chair of painting. These were years of intense work for Guccione, but also of many international awards. Since the 1980s he has participated in numerous exhibitions in important international museum institutions. His figure is closely linked to the "Scicli group", a definition coined by Guttuso himself during an interview with Il Tempo in 1981.
Following his death in 2018, Sgarbi stated: "Piero Guccione was undoubtedly, and it must be said clearly and strongly, the greatest painter of the last 50 years", Declares Sgarbi,"After Fontana's death, Gnoli and Burri represented the supreme synthesis of figurative and abstract painting. No one has represented better than him the essence and disturbance of man at the end of the universe of values of the West".
