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Lot Essay
This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity from the Archivio Bonalumi, Bergamo, signed by the artist and numbered 69-003.
Highly active in the Milanese artistic circles of the sixties, Agostino Bonalumi was associated with a new generation of artists wanting to overcome subjective and existential expression in art to examine its concrete and structural realities. Scultura angolare represents Bonalumi's hardedge reaction against the prevailing abstract expressionist's tendency towards mysticism, and their emphasis on the personalised brush-mark and the act of making painting itself dramatically visible. Not wishing to project the personal into his art, Bonalumi's reductivist abstractions establish a unique approach to the artistic tabula rasa called for in the groundbreaking Azimuth journal he co-founded with Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, which demanded, 'Images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are to be' (P. Manzoni, 'For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', Azimuth 2, 1960, reprinted in K. Stiles and P. Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, California 1996, p. 80). Far removed from personal expression or extraneous narrative, the structural materiality of Scultura angolare forms its sole content and purpose, creating a work that actively examines the established paradigm of art and pushes the ground zero logic of Manzoni's white Achrome paintings into a sculptural realm.
Bonalumi's friendship with Lucio Fontana led him to investigate issues of space through environmental installations and the production of his first abstract reliefs. The geometric clarity of Bonalumi's remarkable Scultura angolare bridges the gap between painting and sculpture to challenge the acceptance of the flat rectangle as a ritual prerequisite for painting. Rather than containing an illusionary inner-space, Bonalumi's self-described 'picture-object' (A. Bonalumi cited on https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese) defines and projects into the real space of the viewer's domain, taking on an architectural element to confront the pre-determined limits of existing mediums. Constructed from stacked monochromatic panels, the wooden framework of Scultura angolare protrudes into the warp and weft of the overarching fabric, creating a sequence of convex and concave forms that deliberately disrupts a conventionally two-dimensional canvas. Although the work's angular hourglass form and potentially infinite vertical repetition shares a visual assonance with Brancusi's Endless Column, Bonolumi's art speaks more directly about the historical constructs of painting than sculpture. Shaped into high relief from the standard materials of painting, the work defies the reinforcement of the picture plane sought after by so many abstract painters. Instead, Bonalumi creates a work that can be seen as contradictorily three-dimensional and wall-bound. Its elegant, mirrored angles and curves form a sense of negative space and simultaneously strain away from the intersecting planes it is dependent upon into positive space. Yet despite the sculpture's blank white surface and precise, linear construction, the elastic surface tension of the canvas and the subtle ridges of over-brushed tempera provide a handmade and tactile quality that firmly maintains its elevated status as art object.
Highly active in the Milanese artistic circles of the sixties, Agostino Bonalumi was associated with a new generation of artists wanting to overcome subjective and existential expression in art to examine its concrete and structural realities. Scultura angolare represents Bonalumi's hardedge reaction against the prevailing abstract expressionist's tendency towards mysticism, and their emphasis on the personalised brush-mark and the act of making painting itself dramatically visible. Not wishing to project the personal into his art, Bonalumi's reductivist abstractions establish a unique approach to the artistic tabula rasa called for in the groundbreaking Azimuth journal he co-founded with Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, which demanded, 'Images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are to be' (P. Manzoni, 'For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', Azimuth 2, 1960, reprinted in K. Stiles and P. Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, California 1996, p. 80). Far removed from personal expression or extraneous narrative, the structural materiality of Scultura angolare forms its sole content and purpose, creating a work that actively examines the established paradigm of art and pushes the ground zero logic of Manzoni's white Achrome paintings into a sculptural realm.
Bonalumi's friendship with Lucio Fontana led him to investigate issues of space through environmental installations and the production of his first abstract reliefs. The geometric clarity of Bonalumi's remarkable Scultura angolare bridges the gap between painting and sculpture to challenge the acceptance of the flat rectangle as a ritual prerequisite for painting. Rather than containing an illusionary inner-space, Bonalumi's self-described 'picture-object' (A. Bonalumi cited on https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese) defines and projects into the real space of the viewer's domain, taking on an architectural element to confront the pre-determined limits of existing mediums. Constructed from stacked monochromatic panels, the wooden framework of Scultura angolare protrudes into the warp and weft of the overarching fabric, creating a sequence of convex and concave forms that deliberately disrupts a conventionally two-dimensional canvas. Although the work's angular hourglass form and potentially infinite vertical repetition shares a visual assonance with Brancusi's Endless Column, Bonolumi's art speaks more directly about the historical constructs of painting than sculpture. Shaped into high relief from the standard materials of painting, the work defies the reinforcement of the picture plane sought after by so many abstract painters. Instead, Bonalumi creates a work that can be seen as contradictorily three-dimensional and wall-bound. Its elegant, mirrored angles and curves form a sense of negative space and simultaneously strain away from the intersecting planes it is dependent upon into positive space. Yet despite the sculpture's blank white surface and precise, linear construction, the elastic surface tension of the canvas and the subtle ridges of over-brushed tempera provide a handmade and tactile quality that firmly maintains its elevated status as art object.