Deformazione, Ovvero La Vedova Allegra (Deformation or the Merry Widow), 1930

Italian artist Guglielmo Sansoni, using the pseudonym 'Tato', was a prominent figure of the Italian Futurist movement during the 1930s. Together with F. T. Marinetti, Tato authored 'Manifesto of Futurist Photography' in 1930, in which the artists declared photography's ability to eliminate barriers between art and life, and to explore art's social function. Tato also expressed the importance of the 'transparency of opaque bodies' and the 'camouflaging of objects' in his work, which manifests in photomontages like the present work that incorporates the superimposition of multiple negatives. A bold designer, graphic artist and painter as well as photographer, Tato's work is most strongly characterized by the transformation of recognizable forms using light and shadow and the simultaneous representation of the absurd.