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Artist or Maker: Emilio Vedova (b. 1919)
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Provenance: Galerie Neuendorf, Frankfurt-am-Main.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in the early 1990s.
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Exhibited: Venice, Palazzo Grassi, Vitalità nell'Arte, August-September 1959. This exhibition later travelled to Recklinghausen, Kunsthalle, October-December 1959 and Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, December 1959-January 1960.
Madrid, Ateneo, Vedova, May-June 1961 (illustrated).
Verona, Galleria Civica di Arte Moderna, Palazzo della Gran Guardia, Disegni di Vedova 1935-1950, September-October 1961.
Republic of San Marino, Palazzo dei Congressi, Vedova Compresenze, 1946-1981, September-October 1981, no. 2 (illustrated p. 22).
Venice, Museo Correr, Emilio Vedova, May-September 1984, no. 108 (illustrated in colour p. 136).
Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Emilio Vedova, February-April 1986. This exhibition later travelled to Leverkusen, Des Stadtischen Museums Scholss Morsbroich, April-June 1986 and Darmstadt, Kunsthalle, June-August 1986.
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Italian Art in the 20th Century, January-April 1989, no. 173 (illustrated in colour pp. 328-329).
Frankfurt-am-Main, Galerie Neuendorf, Emilio Vedova, April-May 1989, no. 6 (illustrated in colour unpaged).
Milan, Galleria Arte Borgogna, Vedova, December 1989-January 1990, no. 1 (illustrated on the cover of the catalogue).
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968, October 1994-January 1995, no. 67 (illustrated in colour). This exhibition later travelled to Milan, Triennale di Milano, February-May 1995 and Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, May-August 1995.
Turin, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Emilio Vedova, October 1998-January 1999 (illustrated in colour p. 43).
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Literature: J. Schilling, Emilio Vedova, Braunschweig, 1981 (illustrated pp. 70-71).
Exh. cat. Milan, Padiglione d'arte contemporanea, Vedova...Continuum..., May-June 1991 (the artist working on the painting p. 127).
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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A EUROPEAN COLLECTOR
This work was painted for the exhibition Vitalità nell'Arte held in the Palazzo Grassi, Venice in 1959, and was executed in the exhibition room.
We are grateful to the artist and to Sonia Osetta for their assistance in cataloguing this work.
'If you look at the tension bursting in my signs' Vedova said, 'it is easy to label them Informel! But that is superficial. These works are structures - and these are the structures of my consciousness.' (Emilio Vedova, Scontro di Situazioni, lecture on 27 September 1962).
Scontro di Situazioni I (Collision of Situations) is a large and important triptych painted in 1959 in which Vedova gives full rein to the scale and drama of human feeling, co-ordinating a complex structure of form from the seemingly spontaneous chaos of his gestural-looking brushwork. Commanding a wide range of marks that, after closer inspection, emerge from the energy of the surface to appear like ciphers clashing, colliding and counterbalancing one another, Vedova convincingly conveys a powerful sense of a world held in a febrile state of balance by the opposing energy of tremendous forces.
As Germano Celant has written of the Scontro di Situazioni, these paintings are 'canvases where black marks lay claim to a subterranean, primordial language, no longer contracted but vital and unrestrained. They are absolute graphs that furrow the surface like incidental uncalculated galaxies. Residues and traces of vanished constellations, they capture the fugitive intensities of a new planet. The space of these astral nuclei is scattered with irregular paths and dissolving figures, rapid gestures and authentic ruins, torments and rages, fears and tenderness. They are areas of suspension that allow Vedova to open up, without defences, and stretch out, without worry, in front of others, in order to become their horizon.' (cited in exh. cat., Vedova, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 1998, p. 249.)
As Vedova himself pointed out in a lecture that he gave on this important series of works, ultimately, the Scontro di Situazioni I reflect the existential nature of man and the artist's own personal journey of experience. Carefully co-ordinated into a somewhat futurist interaction of form, the three parts of the painting are a delving - through chance, spontaneity and intuition - into the artist's own nature and sense of self. 'We know that truths are also sometimes found through adventure - by chance', he said. 'The means is recovered out of the need for a tension-filled charge, which is why techniques are articulated out of this moment of furor... The stronger things need to be said, the more you can be sure the material, the technique will be found. The artist has an eternal sense of investigation...for me this IS painting! To contribute to fortify an autonomy of sensibility, of choice, however possible: from a vast panorama where all activities of man are alive - this is the artist's responsibility. For each of us first to refer back to ourselves. Not coercing others with this discourse, because the experience, or the choice must be made by each person on his own' (Scontro di situazioni 1961, reproduced ibid, pp. 42-3).
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