Rosso (Red)
Date: 2011
Medium: Shaped canvas and acrylic
Dimensions: 90 x 60 cm
Agostino Bonalumi was at the forefront of the exceptional wave of Italian artists who followed in the footsteps of Lucio Fontana in the late 1950s and 1960s. Inspired by Fontana’s spatial experiments with the canvas, Bonalumi had begun working with Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni as early as 1958. By the mid-1960s, Bonalumi’s reputation was reaching new heights both internationally and at home, with strong links to Germany’s Zero artists and critics in Italy already beginning to recognise his importance; in 1966, the artist was invited to take part at the Venice Biennale for the first time. Bonalumi’s signature works are called estroflessioni, in which monochrome canvases were stretched and deformed from behind to create abstract forms. Pushing the picture plane into three dimensions, Bonalumi’s paintings became sculptures, or, what the critic Gillo Dorfles called pitture-oggetti ('painting-objects'). Alongside Fontana with his knife, Burri with his blowtorch, and Castellani, who hammered nails into the reverse of his pictorial surfaces, Bonalumi was part of a fundamental redefinition of painting: the pictorial plane had become what American art historian Harold Rosenberg called ‘an arena in which to act’.
The present work exemplifies the estroflessioni Bonalumi sought to create. The boldly colored monochrome canvas protrudes outward, breaking into the third dimension to create work that borders on sculptural. It interacts not only with the space beyond the canvas, but with its own surface, casting shadows upon itself and emphasising the material qualities of the medium. The undulating forms create a vision of space that is simultaneously timeless and futuristic. Made just two years before his death, this work is the embodiment of a lifetime of investigation and innovation into the potential of transcending conventional boundaries of space and form.
Provenance
Registered at the Archivio Agostino Bonalumi no. 11-047.
Literature
F. Bonalumi F. & M. Meneguzzo, Agostino Bonalumi. Catalogue Raisonné, Milan 2015, Vol. II p. 776, fig. 1983.