CONTEMPORARY ECHOES
REDISCOVERING ITALIAN ART FROM 1950-1980

Featured Artists

ALBERTO BURRI  (1915–1995)

Alberto Burri along with Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, was one of the pre-eminent Italian multi-media artists of the twentieth century. While the American avant-garde was headed in the direction of Action Painting, Burri pursued a more studied approach to abstract art.  In February 1946, Burri set up a studio and started experimenting with unorthodox pigments and resins; he produced his Catrami (tars) and Muffe (molds), as well as protruding, sculptural canvases that he called Gobbi (hunchbacks).

By 1950 he was making assemblages out of burlap bags and household linens—Sacchi (Sacks) and Bianchi (Whites)—that garnered him international acclaim. His first solo exhibitions in the United States took place in 1953 at the Allan Frumkin Gallery, Chicago, and the Stable Gallery, New York. That same year, his work appeared in the exhibition Younger European Painters: A Selection (1953–54) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. As his international reputation climbed, Burri turned to colored industrial materials and developed the technique of ‘painting with combustion’, a process by which he created torched wood veneers, welded steel reliefs, and compositions of melted and charred plastic. Burri also fostered an interest in cracked surfaces which reached its high point with his monumental Grande cretto project. In this exhibition, you can see a little Cretto on display.

EMILIO TADINI  (1927–2002)

Emilio Tadini was a prominent figure in the post-war Italian art world. He was a visual artist, writer, journalist, and art historian.

His pictorial work develops in different cycles. It is influenced by English Pop Art, by the paintings of De Chirico, and Picasso. Tadini’s work developed an increasingly refined language, original of figurative oneiric. He has a closer connection to the more introspective and personal British Pop Art than to its glossy American counterpart. He was also greatly influenced by surrealism and cubism.

ENRICO BAJ (1924–2003) 

Enrico Baj was an Italian artist and writer. Many of his works show an obsession with nuclear war. In 1951 he founded the arte nucleare group with fellow Italian artists Gianni Bertini and Sergio Dangelo, creating works in Italy and abroad that directly responded to the dangers of the nuclear age. At this time, he was also associated with the CoBrA art movement.

On the one hand, Baj’s work emphasizes the joyful experience of painting with diverse materials and colors; however, on the other, it provides social commentary and a strong criticism of contemporary society. In 1963 he co-founded the Institute of ‘Pataphysics, in honor of Alfred Jarry, author of the Ubu Roi, with the photographer Man Ray. 

Throughout his life, Baj was in close contact with artists, poets, and intellectuals, both in Italy and abroad, and collaborated on numerous occasions to produce prints or original multiples for several artists’ books that often led to their censorship by the government. Enrico Baj continued to work and produce art until very near his death in 2003.

FRANCO ANGELI (1935–1988)

Franco Angeli was one of the main exponents of the School of Piazza del Popolo, along with Mario Schifano and Tano Festa. After a beginning confluence by the art of Alberto Burri, Angeli created works in which his canvas alternated with cotton gauze stained with paint, from which emerged a series of images and symbols of power and violence, such as imperial eagles and even swastikas. These symbols were expressed in his art representing the regimes that Angeli has experienced in his life which heavily influenced his art and political commitments. Being a very politically active individual, representing his beliefs through his work became a fundamental aspect of his life and art.

Angeli’s art is characterized by the presence of material inserts such as gauze and veils, which covers the surface of the canvas and makes the subject barely visible, as if it were a distant memory in time. In particular, this technique is a reflection on power and the visual rhetoric which inspired him to create a very personal and revelatory mythology. A new attention to a more intimate, familiar sphere, with a renewed attention to the landscape and to the figure, only emerged at the end of the 1970s.

GIO POMODORO (1930–2002)

Giò Pomodoro (1930–2002) was an Italian sculptor, printmaker, and stage designer. A part of a family of artists, his brother is the famed Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro. In 1954 he began to produce reverse reliefs in clay and started to form assemblages of various materials, including wood, textiles, and plaster which were then cast in metal.

During the 1960s, Pomodoro developed several series of sculptures, which explored a range of abstract shapes, usually with smooth undulating surfaces. The late 1960s witnessed Pomodoro’s debut in American galleries. In 1995 the International Sculpture Center (I.S.C.) in Washington D.C. invited him to be a member of the board.

Giò Pomodoro’s works are present in public and private collections all over the world including the Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Kunst und Museumsverein in Germany, Yorkshire Sculpture Park of Wakefield, the Modern Art Collection of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and the Musée d’Ixelles in Belgium, to name a few.

GIUSEPPE CAPOGROSSI  (1900–1972 )

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Giuseppe Capogrossi, like many other European artists, embarked upon a profound rethinking of his creative approach. With the gradual abandonment of figuration, after a brief period of neo-cubist experiences (1947-1949), he arrived at a rigorous and personal abstractionism characterized by a unique form-sign which, combined in infinite variations, arrived at the point in which it constructed the space of the painting, a symbolic representation of an inner spatial organization.

In 1951, Capogrossi took part in the foundation of the Origine group, with Mario Ballocco, Alberto Burri and Ettore Colla, and achieved international fame by participating in March 1951 in Paris—as the only Italian—in the Véhémences Confrontées exhibition. Capogrossi subsequently became one of the main exponents of Italian informal art, together with Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri.

MARIO CEROLI (1938–)

Mario Ceroli is an Italian sculptor, painter and set designer. He has become known as one of the most influential artists of the Italian post-war era. In 1959, Ceroli began to experiment with new materials, particularly with raw wood, such as Russian pinewood. In the 1960s, influenced by Pop Art and in particular by the works of Louise Nevelson and Joe Tilson, he began to experiment with the use of rags, paper and other materials in connection with the artistic research of the so-called Arte Povera. From September 1966 to June 1967, Mario Ceroli moved to the United States exhibiting in various locations such as the Bonino Gallery in New York. During his time living in America, Ceroli made one of the pieces that we have in our exhibition. His work has gone on to be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as in the Mississippi Art Museum in Jackson, Mississippi.

MARIO SCHIFANO (1934–1998)

Often called ‘Italy’s Andy Warhol’, Mario Schifano is one of the most significant artists of Italian postmodernism. His work often referred to popular culture or art history, featuring well-known brand logos or kitsch recurring motifs in the vein of Pop Art. Though never formally trained as an artist, by 1960 Schifano had begun to create the works that established his reputation—the series known as Monocromi, in which each canvas consisted of an energetic field of a single colour.  Later Schifano joined the group of artists known as the School of Piazza del Popolo. Working in numerous media throughout his career, Schifano is perhaps best known for his collages consisting of advertising, scrap paper, and painted components. In the mid-1960s, Schifano moved for a period to New York, where he shared an apartment with the poet Frank O’Hara and kept company with Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. In 1963, Schifano was one of the few Europeans to show alongside Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in The New Realists, the landmark Pop Art exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery. A hard partier, Schifano struggled with drug addiction, which landed him in prison on several occasions, and dated Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull, who left Mick Jagger for him. The Rolling Stones wrote the 1969 song “Monkey Man” about him. 

At one point during the 1970s, Mario Schifano had televisions going in every room of his home, as well as in his studio. It helped him work. For the Italian painter and filmmaker, TV was not only the lens through which his generation had come to see the world, but ripe material for his own art. We have several of these artworks on view in this exhibition.

PIERO DORAZIO (1927–2005)

Piero Dorazio (1927–2005) praised abstraction as a universal language, one that could provide a purely optical experience. Central to his art was the role of color. Rather than assign it symbolic values, he believed that ‘color possesses a natural power’.

In 1947 he co-founded the group Forma 1, which produced the Manifesto del Formalismo-Forma 1. Also in 1947, Dorazio was awarded a scholarship to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he spent a year and met Jean Arp, Georges Braque, Sonia Delaunay, Le Corbusier, Gino Severini, and other prominent artists. In 1950, Dorazio helped to organize the cooperative gallery of the Age d’Or group in both Rome and Florence, and in 1952 he promoted the international foundation, Origine, in Rome, which published the periodical Arti Visive.

In 1953 he traveled to the United States, where he met Clement Greenberg, Frederick Kiesler, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, while also presenting his first solo exhibitions at the Wittenborn One-Wall Gallery and the Rose Fried Gallery in New  York. From 1960 to 1969 he taught at the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania and subsequently held many academic positions. Among the several exhibitions of his work organized in Italy and in foreign countries are those at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1979), at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (1979), and at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome (1983).

VALERIO ADAMI ( 1935–)

Valerio Adami is a notable painter associated with the Pop Art movement and best known for depicting historical, mythological, and Surrealist scenes using stylized outlines and flat planes of color. His style was inspired by Expressionism and French Cloisonnism, which enclosed flat planes of color in black outlines. Adami’s paintings are very graphic and visually disturbing or grotesque. During the sixties, he became the main leader of the New Figuration, taking part in both the Figuration narrative dans l’art contemporain (1965) and Bande dessinée et figuration narrative (1967) exhibitions.

In the 1970s, Adami began to include imagery from politics, literature, music, and mythology in his work.  Although many of his paintings allude to European culture, Adami also produced paintings of seedy public locations, such as his Hotel Chelsea Bathroom (1968).  Adami’s work is held in several museum collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Rome, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.