London - An exciting exhibition displaying pioneering works of abstract art from Italy will be on show at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London N1, from 28 June to 24 September 2006.  Encompassing five decades, the exhibition aims to provide an overview of the various tendencies and developments within Italian abstraction during its formative years, and includes some 60 works by a number of high-profile artists as well as those who are perhaps less familiar. 

Abstraction first emerged in Italian art around 1910, partly as an extension of the scientific interests of Divisionism.   Like Neo-Impressionist painters such as Seurat, the Italian Divisionists were concerned with the study of light, constructing images from small dashes of pure color to achieve greater luminosity.  Giacomo Balla was to push such ideas into bold new abstract directions from 1912 in his series of Iridescent Compenetrations, in which the play of light – represented as brilliantly hued intersecting lozenges of color – became the sole subject of the work.

In 1909 the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti established the Futurist movement.  Insisting that ‘there can be no modern painting without the starting point of an absolutely modern sensation’, the Futurists turned to the urban environment and the machine for inspiration, making the evocation of speed and dynamic movement their central artistic goal.  Further experiments with abstraction followed, Balla again being at the forefront of these, depicting the ‘essential force-lines of speed’ as brightly colored arcs and thrusting, jagged forms in works such as Speeding Automobile, 1913.

Taking spiritual inspiration from the machine during the 1920s, the Futurists created works grounded in the perceived ‘mechanical’ values of precision, geometrical severity and clean, sharp lines, as in Fillia’s Dynamic Still Life of 1927.  By contrast, the 1930s saw the employment of ‘biomorphic’ abstraction in the work of painters such as Enrico Prampolini, where disembodied, organic forms suspended in space were intended to evoke the visual and psychological sensations of flight, as illustrated by Encounter with Matter, 1930.

Both of these styles reflected the influence of contemporary international aesthetics, from Purism to De Stijl, Constructivism, the Bauhaus and Surrealism.  However, the true phase of abstraction in Italy developed during the late 1930s, principally in the north of the country.  Milan’s Galleria del Milione was a focal point, showing work by such artists as Lucio Fontana and Fausto Melotti.  Como was another centre. Here, abstract painters were in close contact with the Rationalist architects, their clean lines and geometric elegance exerting a direct influence on the work of artists such as Manlio Rho and Mario Radice.  Certain artists and critics identified these ‘neo-classical’ tendencies as the distinguishing characteristic of Italian abstraction.  A manifesto of the time proclaimed: ‘We believe today in a type of Mediterranean climate made up of order and equilibrium … We are thus favorably disposed to accept the classical’. Parallels were inevitably noted in some quarters between the political ‘new order’ of Fascism and the rigour and formal discipline of such art.

Another defining trait was that of Italian art’s resistance of dogmatic formulas and belief in free experimentation.  The vivacity of Mauro Reggiani’s imagery in Composition, 1954, loaned from a private collection, and the playfulness of the work of Bruno Munari, Achille Perilli and Osvaldo Licini are good examples of this idiosyncratic quality.  As Licini stated in 1935: ‘Painting is the art of colours and forms freely conceived … an irrational art in which fantasy and imagination – that is to say, poetry – predominate’.

Until the late 1950s geometric or ‘post-Cubist’ abstraction remained the dominant form of non-objective art in Italy.  Subsequently, Arte Informale (‘Informal Art’) became more widespread with its emphasis on the artist’s dynamic, expressionistic ‘gesture’ – anticipated by artists such as Afro, and Bice Lazzari, and typified by the bold, explosive work of Emilio Vedova – as well as by an engagement with the materiality of the media being used, as in Alberto Burri’s famous works in burlap, or Ettore Colla’s constructions from discarded industrial materials.  This ‘organic’ tendency within Arte Informale was also represented by Ennio Morlotti, whose characteristic dense impasto evokes ideas of earth, growth and germination.

This tantalizing survey of early Italian abstraction, curated by Renato Miracco, is organized in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute (www.icilondon.esteri.it) and supported by the Italian Embassy, London.

Visit Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art at : www.estorickcollection.com