Lucio Fontana writing Spazialismo on canvas, 1964-66. © Lucio Fontana/SIAE / DACS, London 2015. Photo Ugo Mulas © Ugo Mulas Hiers. All rights reserved.
From the late 1940s to the late 1970s art production in Italy mirrored Italy’s shift from an economy based on farming and craft into an industrial reality that would become one of the most advanced in the western world.
The variety of art production during these decades is utterly unique in the European artistic circle witnessing artists from different backgrounds getting involved into a new conversation among diferent typologies of creative expressions. The classic heritage, which has played – and still is playing – an important role in the development of modern and contemporary Italian creative language, is woven with new methods of expression from industrial design to more radical use of materials.
Lucio Fontana Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1965. Waterpaint on canvas.
The ingenuity storm that swept Italy during the economic boom made way for the birth and the growth of a generation of artists who were not shy to experiment. Playing upon dichotomies, they were not afraid to mix the archaic and the ancient with new and provocative forms and materials.
Embracing both a playful way and even melancholic way, Italian artists defned a territory that still has not been matched by any other Western artistic environment. Either grouped ideologically or moving individually, the artists in Italy have been able to shape and defne polyphony of new voices that have been greatly infuential both in Europe and the United States.
The ingenuity storm that swept Italy during the economic boom made way for the birth and the growth of a generation of artists who were not shy to experiment.
This group of works presented in our 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale is a cross section which confrms the strength of Italy in modern and contemporary art history. The focus is not simply on sculpture or painting but on how surface, matter, shape and form can question and redefine the symbolic realm established by a painting or a sculpture.
With the economic boom, Italian societal dynamics were changing and these Italian artists began to address those changes with their work. Through an open conversation with other experimental fields like industrial design and architecture, they were extending beyond fne art through to a more expansive cultural feld.
Alberto Burri Legno, 1959. Oil and wood collage on canvas.
Model of a two horse chariot (one horse lost), found in the Tiber River, Roman Bronze 1-3rd century AD. British Museum, London. Image: Bridgeman Images.
From a Marino Marini horse that is rethinking ancient Etruscan sculpture to a Pier Paolo Calzolari with a surface of salt and lead, there is a red line which connects the same preoccupations: how to save the Italian identity’s roots; a grounded love for simple forms and meaningful materials, while at the same time expressing the issues of the present.
The contrast between archaic reality and the temptations of abstraction is very clear in the work of Alberto Burri who is pairing wood and oil paint which at first seems an unlikely pairing, yet now, resonates as successful collage where the ephemeral mutate into a the strength of a fragment that could have appeared on a wall of a Pompeian Domus.
Piero Manzoni Achrome, 1958. Kaolin on canvas.
Agostino Bonalumi Rosso, 1966. Vinyl tempera on shaped canvas.
Although notions of the past at first tended to conjure a negativity amoungst the artists, it eventually became their best ally. Manzoni’s Achrome hides the fascination with the drapes which dress ancient Roman sculptures but appears in all its capacity to synthesize the legacy of tradition into a contemporary and revolutionary vision. While Lucio Fontana’s only apparently simple slashes of the canvas contain and condense in a still unsurpassed gesture the short breath of the Futurists’s lesson, Agostino Bonalumi in a tongue in cheek manner quotes the rise of a new generation of designers mostly devoted to the ever expanding Italian car industry of the 1950s and 1960s, like Bertone, Giugiaro or Pininfarina.
Mimmo Rotella Untitled, 1964
Meanwhile, Mimmo Rotella with his décollages, comments on another cultural phenomenon the collective fascination with the growing flm industry of Cinecittà, the famous compound in Rome where in the 1960’s many American blockbusters were shot bringing in the city the most sought International movies stars of the moments, completing what we could justly call ‘The Italian Dream’.