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Getulio Alviani
A multifaceted artist, art critic, and institutional director, Getulio Alviani emerged in the 1960s as one of the leading exponents of programmed art. Also known as kinetic art or op art, this movement is characterized by the use of industrial materials and the importance placed on design and modes of experience, which are programmed almost scientifically. After studying architecture, Alviani devoted himself to an artistic production that lies at the intersection of architecture, industrial design, and graphic design, with A predilection for cold materials and geometries that nevertheless require the active participation of the public. Alviani's rigorous research often focuses on the theme of movement, real or illusory, achieved through light and optical effects. His early works (Superfici a testura vibratile) are regular modules of aluminum sheets whose surfaces are milled, polished, or chromed. Alviani creates Also environmental works, such as Interrelazione cromospeculare (1969), a space in which mirrors and colors move and merge with the intervention of the public. Close to the collectives of Gruppo T and Gruppo N, Alviani exhibited at the 1964 Venice Biennale, in a room with Enzo Mari and Enrico Castellani. In 1965 he was invited to the fundamental exhibition of kinetic art "The Responsive Eye" at MoMA, while in 1968 he took part in Documenta 4, which was followed by important commissions around the world and participation in exhibitions in prestigious institutions in Italy. and abroad.
Carla Accardi
A leading figure in Italian abstract art and the post-World War II art scene, in 1947 Carla Accardi co-signed the Forma 1 group manifesto in Rome, calling for a language based on color and the drawing of abstract forms, in line with contemporary research developing in Europe. In the following years, the artist participated in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad; in 1964, a solo room was dedicated to her work in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where she would exhibit again in 1976, 1978, and 1988. Carla Accardi's painting, rejecting any figurative or realist image, is a weave of rigorous geometric motifs that appear to be free creations dictated by the unconscious. Initially characterized by linear white marks on black backgrounds, in the 1960s the compositions adopted color, expressed in complex and vibrant two-tone designs with an intense emotional tone. During the 1970s, at the height of the economic boom, the artist replaced the traditional canvas support with sheets of sicofoil, a transparent plastic. Mounted in layers on the visible frame or even rolled up and placed directly on the floor, the sicofoil painted with characteristic geometric marks becomes a diaphragm in which the transparency of the support regulates the passage of beams of light, in a continuous overlapping of planes interacting with the surrounding environment, as in Rosso scuro (1974) and Punto con raggi (1972).
Enrico Castellani
Enrico Castellani's artistic research is the result of a profound and careful reflection on painting and the traditional meaning of painting. After attending courses in painting and sculpture at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and architecture lessons at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in 1956 he returned to Milan where, in 1959, together with Piero Manzoni and Vincenzo Agnetti, he founded the magazine "Azimuth", which promoted an experiment aimed at overcoming the concept traditional understanding of the work of art and its limitations. A protagonist at a time of great artistic ferment in Italy, in 1964 he was present at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition in the Italian Pavilion. In 1968 he participated in Documenta 4 in Kassel, and in the same year he was at the forefront of the protests at the Milan Triennale and the Venice Biennale. Black Surface is from 1959, his first monochrome painting obtained by shaping the surface in introflexions and extroflexions of the canvas, through a rear structure of nails fixed on a particular frame prepared by the artist according to a rigorous geometric design. The arrangement of the reliefs is determined from time to time in relation to the size of the canvas and the chosen color - always monochrome - and is functional to the movement of light that is desired; on what is no longer considered a two-dimensional surface, light, time and space come into play. Superficie bianca (1968) is in line with artistic research that considers the work as a single whole, the canvas and the frame, in which the environment and the surrounding light create ever-changing space-time rhythms.
Maurizio Cattelan
An artist of undisputed fame, who has sparked worldwide conversation about himself and his disconcerting, irritating, ironic, and unsettling works of art, Maurizio Cattelan, faced with this inestimable success, has repeatedly stated that he chose to be an artist because it's a profession where there's no need to work. The very theme of work, understood as the terror of personal failure in contemporary society and as a consequence of unemployment, is one of the topics the artist deals with in his works, for example when he represents the figure of the homeless man. Cattelan, therefore, alongside his playful, impertinent and irreverent streak towards the icons of art (he dismantles Joseph Beuys's credo on art as social regeneration; he mocks the readymade of Duchamp (destroys the artistic approach of Lucio Fontana) and the symbols of political power (his depictions of Kennedy, John Paul II, Hitler), Cattelan openly declares his reflection on the suffering, unhappiness, and dissatisfaction of the contemporary era, and on the condition of submission to the dogmas that oppress man today. It is Cattelan's melancholic side that emerges and is evident in Bidibidobidiboo (1995), a surreal self-portrait of the artist as a suicidal squirrel inside a miniaturized kitchen, a reproduction of the one he lived in as a child. The reference to childhood is also suggested by the fairy-tale title, which grotesquely connects the violence of the act of suicide with the power of magic formula, redeeming man from the condition of submission, towards an escape. In the second work presented in the exhibition (All, 2008), Cattelan addresses the theme of death in an even more overtly tragic way. Nine bodies lined up as in a grave are covered by a light sheet placed over the limbs perfectly outlined by the almost baroque workmanship of the Carrara marble. It is a reflection of the artist on various themes that have always recurred in the history of humanity, such as massacres, persecutions, unjustified deaths, the martyrs, who, like Cattelan's art, disorientate and disconcert the collective unconscious.
Gino De Dominicis
Mystery surrounds the life of Gino De Dominicis, both as a man and as an artist, and his very death is shrouded in obscurity. A larger-than-life character, he lived beyond all rules and order, isolated from any artistic movement, choosing to remain anchored only to himself. A lover of gambling, which led him to live more by night than by day, he created a sort of legend around himself, but never allowed any of his life to be documented in books or photographs, much like his works, which he bought back only to destroy. De Dominicis developed his poetics between the late 1960s and the late 1970s, focusing his philosophy on the temporality of events, the immortality of the body, invisible objects (the presence/absence dichotomy), and the mystery of creation and human existence (expressed in his interest in the Sumerian civilization). Since the 1980s, he has devoted himself more to painting, especially tempera and pencil on wood, making certain visual elements his signature features: men with long noses, women with trunks, deformed bodies with small hands and enormous skulls, majestic shadows, almost bordering on the grotesque. His message, often so indecipherable, aims to underscore the centrality of art, which, through the work, becomes creation and mystery. This enigmatic aura is also found in the chromatic and compositional tones of De Dominicis's first figurative painting, Io a Roma (1986), characterized by a figure on the right and the obelisk of Piazza del Popolo on the left, overlooked by a full moon. Rome is his adopted city, the eternal city par excellence, which, precisely because of its immortal uniqueness, the artist has loved above all else.
Selling paintings Highlights - Gustav Klimt - Hope II
A pregnant woman bows her head and closes her eyes as if praying for the safety of her child. A skull peeks out from behind her stomach, symbolizing the danger she faces. At her feet, three women with bowed heads raise their hands, presumably in prayer, though with such solemnity as to suggest mourning, as if foretelling the child's fate. Why then is the painting titled that? Klimt originally titled this work Vision, and another earlier depiction of a pregnant woman Hope; so by association with the previous one, this painting is known as Hope II. However, there is a richness here that compensates for the woman's gravity. Klimt's artistic inspiration, like that of other artists of his time, originated not only in Europe but also far beyond its borders. He lived in Vienna, a crossroads of East and West, and drew inspiration from Byzantine art, Mycenaean metalwork, Persian carpets and miniatures, Ravenna mosaics, and Japanese screens. In this painting, the woman's gold-patterned dress—drawn flat, like the garments of Russian icons, while her skin is expressed with roundness and three-dimensionality—is of extraordinary decorative beauty. Birth, death, and the sensuality of life are here suspended in balance.
Selling Paintings Highlights - Edvard Munch - The Thunderstorm
Munch painted the storm in Aasgaardstrand, a small Norwegian seaside town where he often stayed. That summer, a severe storm had indeed struck, but this doesn't seem to be the subject of the painting, nor even its after-effects, but rather an internal storm, a mental anguish. Standing by the water, in the mysterious midnight blue of a Scandinavian summer, a mixture of light and shadow, a young woman clutches her head. Other women stand at a distance and repeat her same anguished gesture, the reason for which is unclear. Their arrangement in a circle and the protagonist's white dress suggest some ancient pagan ritual, although the solid house in the background with its illuminated windows suggests a normal life from which women are excluded, or perhaps they themselves cannot tolerate Munch's ancient expression. It reveals the transformation of personal memories or emotions into a dreamlike, mythical, and enigmatic dimension. His contact with French Symbolist poetry during his time in Paris convinced him of the urgent need for a more subjective art: no more paintings of "people reading and women knitting" were needed. A participant in the international Symbolist movement in the 1990s, he would become a precursor to Expressionism.
Selling Paintings Highlights - Auguste Rodin - Monument to Balzac
Rodin, who had been commissioned to create a commemorative work for the greatest French novelist, devoted himself for seven years to studying the writer's biography and works, had models pose that resembled him and made clothes to his measurements. In essence, however, Rodin did not intend to celebrate the physical appearance of "Honoré de Balzac" so much as the idea and spirit of the man, his creative energy: "I think of his industriousness, his difficult existence, his perennial battles and his immense courage. This is what I would like to express." Many of the studies for this work are nudes, but Rodin dressed the figure inspired by the dressing gown often worn by the writer who loved to work at night. The result is a monolithic, free-standing, phallic figure that rises upwards, dominated by the rough relief and the cavities that define the face and head. The monument to Balzac is a visual metaphor for the author's energy and genius, but when the cast in The plaster model was first exhibited in Paris in 1898 and was harshly criticized; accused of resembling a sack of coal, a snowman, or a seal, the literary society that had commissioned the work called it "a crude sketch." Rodin kept the plaster model in his home on the outskirts of Paris, and it was only cast in bronze years after his death.
Selling Paintings Highlights - Paul Cézanne - The Bather
The Bather is one of Cézanne's most evocative figure paintings, although the slender muscles of the torso and arms reveal no heroic aspirations and the drawing, in accordance with traditional 21st-century canons, is crude and imprecise. The bather's left leg is forward and firmly resting on the ground, while the right, drawn back, bears no weight. The right side of the body is raised compared to the left, the chin asymmetrically lowered, the right arm oblong and oblique. The landscape is as barren as a desert, but the colors green, purple, and pink belie this definition. The dreamy vastness is well suited to the pensive bather. Likewise, the shadows of the body do not tend towards black, but take on the tones of air, earth, and water, and the brushstrokes create a network of impetuous yet extremely refined hatchings and stains. The figure comes towards us but does not meet our gaze. It is a typically modern restlessness, revealing the fact that, despite Cézanne's profound respect for traditional art, he did not represent the male nude like classical or Renaissance artists. "He wanted an art that was solid and lasting, like the art of museums," but which also reflected modern sensibilities and the new way of conceiving visual impressions and light. of the Impressionists. He wanted an art of his time that challenged the tradition of the past.