The work of 1916-17 – Screen with speed line (val. $600.000-800.000 – , 151×126 cm, is from the artist's Futurist period – and marks the transition from dynamic research on light to a new phase of highly synthetic pictorial research.
In 1915 Balla con Depero wrote the Futurist reconstruction of the universe : We Futurists Balla and Depero are looking for the realization of this total fusion in order to re-construct the universe to make it more joyful, in other words we are looking for a complete re-construction”
Il Screen, made up of four oil-painted canvases, it bears witness to the artist's will to get out of the narrow dimensions of the picture to enter the environment of life, according to the revolutionary principles of Futurism.
Il Paravento futurista has to its credit a tour important exhibition: in Paris, in 1972, al Musée d'art moderni de la ville de Paris on the occasion of the monograph on the artist; in Turin, in 1980, at the Mole Antonelliana, for the exhibition Futurist reconstruction of the Universe; in 1984 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, on the occasion of The Folding Image and, in the same year, at the Yale University Art Gallery; follows the famous Futurism & Futurists, of Palazzo Grassi, Venice, in 1986 and, in 2014, al Guggenheim in New York for the retrospective Italian Futurism: Reconstructing the Universe.
