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拍品专文
'In her studio on Via dei Bossi... Dada Maino addresses a blank canvas but does not think of beginning a new painting. She is weary of the rhetoric of painting, of the now outworn repertoire of Art Informel... She contemplates a different form of expression: sober and controlled, simultaneously crystalline and elusive. Hence the birth of the Volumes. With a pondered but resolute act, Dada cuts the surface of the canvas, not a small incision but a gaping hole, an expanding ellipse... The place of painting is now a place of silence' (in E. Pontiggia, Dadamaino, Milan, 1990, in Elementi spaziali: Bonalumi, Castellani, Dadamaino, Scheggi, exh. cat., Milan, 2011, pp. 28-32).
Volume is an important early example of a group of works created by Dadamaino at the beginning of her career as an artist. This work dates from 1958, which was in fact before she had become associated with Azimuth or with Group Zero, and indeed before her name had been conflated to one word. When Volume was created, Eduarda, or 'Dada', Maino was one of a group of young, trail-blazing artists working in a manner that revealed the liberating influence of their mentor, Lucio Fontana. Like Fontana, Dadamaino has opened up her canvas, creating vast oval rents within its surface. She has, though, moved beyond the mystical aspect of Fontana's Spatialism, and has instead created a work in which the entire nature of painting is inspected, found wanting, taken to pieces and reassembled in a new, provocative way.
Dadamaino had qualified in medicine and had been an amateur artist. She had met Piero Manzoni, who became a close friend, the year before she created Volume. Within a short time, she had abandoned the figurative idiom of her more amateur years, discarding the clutter of imagery and instead involving herself in a visceral investigation of the bare bones of painting itself. This is clear in Volume, in which she has opened up that surface, introducing two vacuums within the very surface of the work. In this way, she has added her own unique perspective to the investigation of the picture surface that was then occupying a generation of artists in Milan, many of whom were Dadamaino's friends as well as contemporaries. Each of these artists found their own idiom with which to penetrate both the picture surface, and the entire question of how art could function in the modern world - and Dadamaino's idiom is encapsulated in Volume.
Volume is an important early example of a group of works created by Dadamaino at the beginning of her career as an artist. This work dates from 1958, which was in fact before she had become associated with Azimuth or with Group Zero, and indeed before her name had been conflated to one word. When Volume was created, Eduarda, or 'Dada', Maino was one of a group of young, trail-blazing artists working in a manner that revealed the liberating influence of their mentor, Lucio Fontana. Like Fontana, Dadamaino has opened up her canvas, creating vast oval rents within its surface. She has, though, moved beyond the mystical aspect of Fontana's Spatialism, and has instead created a work in which the entire nature of painting is inspected, found wanting, taken to pieces and reassembled in a new, provocative way.
Dadamaino had qualified in medicine and had been an amateur artist. She had met Piero Manzoni, who became a close friend, the year before she created Volume. Within a short time, she had abandoned the figurative idiom of her more amateur years, discarding the clutter of imagery and instead involving herself in a visceral investigation of the bare bones of painting itself. This is clear in Volume, in which she has opened up that surface, introducing two vacuums within the very surface of the work. In this way, she has added her own unique perspective to the investigation of the picture surface that was then occupying a generation of artists in Milan, many of whom were Dadamaino's friends as well as contemporaries. Each of these artists found their own idiom with which to penetrate both the picture surface, and the entire question of how art could function in the modern world - and Dadamaino's idiom is encapsulated in Volume.