Art-Rite with this auction presents a great work of research and selection of lots, coming exclusively from private collections. The choice of works was dictated by the search for intrinsic characteristics, such as dating, historicity, exhibition curriculum, provenance and relevance within the artist's production.
The first batches of Day Sale are dedicated to Italian and international post-war research: Bruno Munari, Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, Lucio Fontana and Roberto Crippa, Mario Pucciarelli ed Emilio Scanavino. There are also works on paper and ceramics by Bice Lazzari e Maria Lai.
A small selection is dedicated to sculpture, with works by Peter Cascella, Umberto Mastroianni e Joseph Maraniello, which anticipates two futurist works by Giacomo Balla. While there Day Sale, opens on abstract painting: from the abstraction of Radomir Damnjan need Piero Dorazio and, then, through the visual poetry of Emilio Isgro, up to a splendid core of Optical – Kinetic (Franco Grignani, Nanda Vigo e Paolo Scirpa) and analytical painting (Jorrit Tornquist, Claudius Verna e Rodolfo Aricò, Domenico Cantatore, Savior River, Charles Levi, Renzo Vespignani, Fabrizio Clerici e Bepi Romagnoni.
In addition, Pop Art, with significant historical works by Emilio Tadin, Aldo Mondino, Gianni Bertini, Antonio Recalcati, Lucius Del Pezzo, Andy Warhol, David Hockney e Christo.
Un Luigi Ontani “ritrovato”, exhibited in the solo show at the Luciano Inga Pin Gallery in Milan in the early 70s, introduces us to the final part of the Day Sale catalogue, with references to Arte Povera (Giovanni anselmo e Piero Gilardi) and the Transavantgarde (Save, Enzo Cucchi, Nicholas DeMaria e Mimmo Germanà).
In the Evening Sale, a tempera of Fortunato Depero of 1928 and, above all, from a masterpiece by Roberto Marcello Iras Baldessari, the "Spanish Ballerina" of 1922, which initially belonged to an important collection in Hamburg and of which traces had been lost in the decades in which it was kept in a Milanese collection. Coeval is the work on paper by George Gross, with a caricatured and visionary image of the German general who flaunts the symbol of nascent Nazism on his top hat.
A collage on paper Marino Marini it is instead the prelude to one of the most important canvases in terms of quality and dating that appeared on the secondary market of Carlo Maria Mariani, father of pictorial anachronism. Furthermore Renato Guttuso from the 50s and 60s and Mario Schifano with unpublished works for the market. These are two works from the mid-60s, astonishing in quality and poetic synthesis of the author's work: “N. 3 from the archives of Futurism”, performed the day after Schifano's trip in New York, represents one of the first and most successful reworkings of the American Pop language in an Italian key, with a reinterpretation of Futurism. The second work in the catalog by Mario Schifano, "Engineer", was conceived as a tribute to Guttuso and is one of the first works with perspex, a medium that transforms the image of the "land surveyor father" according to the typical procedure of the media production of the author in the following decades.
Iconic and is the mirror of Michelangelo Pistoletto, which introduces two important sculptural works by Daniel Spoerri e Ben vautier.
Through the first photogravure ever made by Andy Warhol and a little work of Maria Lai, we come to the core of theEvening Sale, characterized by the various declinations of the Informal: from an unusual youthful canvas by Gianni Colombo close to the research of Azimut, to the Informal sign of Achille Perilli, hsiao chin e Gaston Chaissac, from the existentialist-expressionist one of Bepi Romagnoni e Mario Pucciarelli to the personal interpretation of Giulio Turcato in the composition with tranquilizers. However, the real protagonist is lot 116, an extraordinary painting by Georges Mathieu, a masterpiece of gestural Informal, excellent in terms of dating, materiality and historicity.
Finally, two important forms of Pietro Consagra and an imposing Nuncio introduce the section dedicated to sculpture, with works by Hector Colla, with its iron, and Mathias goeritz, with a perforated gold foil, a work similar to the one kept in the permanent collection of the MoMA in New York.
Kineticism is exalted in the "almost sculptural" works by Martha Botho e Gianni Colombo, formally "strict" artists who introduce the equally "strict" painting of Radomir Damnjan e Bruno Munari with large abstract canvases from the 60s and 70s.
The catalog closes with the Assessment Tables of Piero Manzoni.
Image: Georges Mathieu, Renier IV, Comte de Mons et de Hainaut, 1954, oil on canvas, 97 x 130 cm.
Estimate: €150.000 – €180.000
Auction of Modern and Contemporary art
Thursday 30 May 2019
Day Sale: 15 pm
Evening Sale: 18pm
Via Giovanni Ventura, 5 – 20134 – Milan (MI)
