Aligi Sassu - Arianna

Ariadne is a popular character in Greek mythology: daughter of Minos, she helped Theseus escape the labyrinth with the help of the famous thread. Ariadne and Theseus, overcome by passion, fled Crete together, but the woman was later abandoned on the island of Naxos. According to mythology, it was the god Dionysus who saved her from despair and took her as his wife. Throughout the history of Western art, subjects inspired by the myth of Ariadne are frequent, especially in movements that drew inspiration from classicism. In particular, the most frequently depicted themes are those of Ariadne on Naxos and Bacchus (Dionysus) and Ariadne.

In this small sculpture, a static element by definition, we see a different approach than Aligi Sassu's, which often focused on the expression of dynamic and uncontrollable forces. This sculpture, instead, demonstrates the artist's interest in the synthesis of form. The subject undergoes a reduction of its anatomy and physiognomy, and this operation is conducted in a rigorously Expressionist manner. Indeed, the synthesis of the subject is conceived to create a curvilinear and sinuous compositional rhythm, whose primary reference is the Expressionist avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century.

Aligi Sassu, born in Milan in 1912 and died in 2000, was a painter and sculptor. His painting efforts focused primarily on the representation of movement and physical strength, which is why the subject of the horse or man on horseback was always congenial to him. In the late 1970s, he and Bruno Munari drafted the pictorial manifesto "Dynamism and Muscular Reform," which called for a return to anti-naturalistic forms in a dynamic sense. Much of his painting, moreover, is inspired by Delacroix and his battles.

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