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Lot Essay
With its vigorous, dramatic and highly expressive surface of large
sweeping and sensuous brushstrokes, smears and drips, Emilio
Vedova’s Untitled presents a magnificent and immersive palimpsest of
paint, colour and gesture. Painted in 1962, this work dates from height
of the artist’s Arte Informel period, a time during which he was one
of the leading figures of this post-war movement. Recalling the large,
painterly abstract works of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock
and the emphatic gesturality of Joan Mitchell, Untitled could also, in its
complex articulation of rich, lavishly applied impasto and shimmering
form, be likened to the work of the Baroque, or indeed of the Venetian
artists, Titian and Tintoretto, around whose art Vedova had grown up.
Inspired by the Informel’s embrace of gestural freedom and the
emphasis on material, Vedova’s work also had a distinctly political
impetus. More than solely a swirling, abstract mass of impulsively
applied paint, Untitled and other works of this time, were complex and
carefully orchestrated compositions through which Vedova attempted
to make sense of the turbulent times in which he lived. Through his
work, Vedova sought to construct a new visual language that was
rooted in both the depths of matter and in the psychological depths into
which Europe had been plunged in the aftermath of the Second World
War. In 1962, the same year that he painted Untitled, Vedova described
his unique form of gestural abstraction as ‘a cry for freedom at all
costs’ (E. Vedova, Scontro di Situazioni, lecture on 27 September 1962).
‘People find themselves again in matter’, he explained of the times in
which he found himself, ‘and through the imminence of matter a “blank
tablet” is achieved. Europe’s consciousness plunges into darkness...
Didn’t this situation originate a morbid taste and the exacerbated
formalisation of matter and trait. A sort of self-defence, an extreme
consciousness, contributed to make it possible for me not to be lost in
such a state… Seeing the tension of my bursting and erupting traits, one
finds the right label at once; Informal! Yet this is superficial. My works
are being built up... and these structures are the structures of my own
consciousness’ (ibid.)
sweeping and sensuous brushstrokes, smears and drips, Emilio
Vedova’s Untitled presents a magnificent and immersive palimpsest of
paint, colour and gesture. Painted in 1962, this work dates from height
of the artist’s Arte Informel period, a time during which he was one
of the leading figures of this post-war movement. Recalling the large,
painterly abstract works of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock
and the emphatic gesturality of Joan Mitchell, Untitled could also, in its
complex articulation of rich, lavishly applied impasto and shimmering
form, be likened to the work of the Baroque, or indeed of the Venetian
artists, Titian and Tintoretto, around whose art Vedova had grown up.
Inspired by the Informel’s embrace of gestural freedom and the
emphasis on material, Vedova’s work also had a distinctly political
impetus. More than solely a swirling, abstract mass of impulsively
applied paint, Untitled and other works of this time, were complex and
carefully orchestrated compositions through which Vedova attempted
to make sense of the turbulent times in which he lived. Through his
work, Vedova sought to construct a new visual language that was
rooted in both the depths of matter and in the psychological depths into
which Europe had been plunged in the aftermath of the Second World
War. In 1962, the same year that he painted Untitled, Vedova described
his unique form of gestural abstraction as ‘a cry for freedom at all
costs’ (E. Vedova, Scontro di Situazioni, lecture on 27 September 1962).
‘People find themselves again in matter’, he explained of the times in
which he found himself, ‘and through the imminence of matter a “blank
tablet” is achieved. Europe’s consciousness plunges into darkness...
Didn’t this situation originate a morbid taste and the exacerbated
formalisation of matter and trait. A sort of self-defence, an extreme
consciousness, contributed to make it possible for me not to be lost in
such a state… Seeing the tension of my bursting and erupting traits, one
finds the right label at once; Informal! Yet this is superficial. My works
are being built up... and these structures are the structures of my own
consciousness’ (ibid.)