Lot 20 : Emilio Vedova (b. 1919)
Auction Location: United Kingdom - 2002
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Description:
Immagine del tempo 3 V signed, inscribed, titled and dated 'EMILIO VEDOVA IMMAGINE DEL TEMPO 3 V 1959 MATERIA 1959' (on the reverse) oil and charcoal on canvas 57 1/8 x 76 7/8in. (145 x 195.2cm.) Painted in 1959 PROVENANCE Herbert Kurz, Dresden. Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1972. NOTES Immagine del tempo 3 V (Image of Time 3 V) is one of the last of a series of similarly titled works that Vedova painted throughout the 1950s. Reflecting the trapping of time in the material of paint through a highly gestural painterly process, these works stand at the highpoint of Vedova's so-called "Informel" period. Although greatly inspired by the work of Wols whom he considered to be the founder of the Informel style, Vedova's relationship with Informel painting is not straightforward as it may at first seem. Vedova embraced the gestural freedom and the emphasis on material of the Informel - indeed on the reverse of this work the artist has scrawled in large letters the word "materia" along with the date 1959 as a way of emphasising the material substance of his painterly work - but his often highly politicized paintings are not simply the products of an unfettered gestural abstraction, but an often complex and highly conscious orchestration of abstract form. As Immagine del tempo 3 V illustrates, Vedova's highly material use of the gestural mark is spontaneously layered and built up in an constructive way to create a shimmering pattern of abstract form that combines to define a material essence. It is as if his paintings are simultaneously forming and unforming themselves and in the process describing a world that is in a constant state of waxing and waning, of becoming and disintegrating. Vedova himself described such works as "a cry for freedom at all costs". "People find themselves again in matter...and through the imminence of matter a 'blank tablet is achieved'," he explained. "Europe's consciousness plunges into darkness. Sartre humiliates mankind by constantly keeping before one's own eyes one's own failures. Myth and courage are deprived of their values. They are being mocked. The indefinite, the Informel is the rendez-vous....and one sinks into chaos...The Informel... annihilates all objects like a magma which keeps on melting and compacting within an overgrowing universe, the boundless taste for matter and trait has not succeeded to show us a new dimension. Of course, one cannot speak of doubt and denial, or voice a possible structure, or a choice of language, if one has not yet sunk to the depths of it all. And this cannot be a permanent situation, since one will get worn out. Didn't this situation originate a morbid taste and the exacerbated formalisation of matter and trait. A sort of self-defence, an extreme consciousness, contributed to make it possible for me not to be lost in such a state... Seeing the tension of my bursting and erupting traits, one finds the right label at once; Informel! Yet this is superficial. My works are being built up... and these structures are the structures of my own consciousness." (Emilio Vedova Scontro di Situazioni lecture on Sept. 27 1962C).
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