SEOUL .- In the first solo exhibition of Emilio Vedova’s work ttaking place in Korea, Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul presents a group of paintings that encapsulate the Italian artist’s distinctive approach to abstraction. Spanning almost 25 years of his celebrated career – from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s – the exhibition charts a key evolution in Vedova’s practice, which had a seismic impact on an emerging generation of neo-expressionist artists in the 1980s, including fellow artist and friend Georg Baselitz, and continues to resonate in the art world today.

The earliest works in the exhibition date to the first years of the 1980s, which mark a pivotal moment in Vedova's artistic practice. At the start of the decade, he undertook a transformative research trip to Mexico. Deeply affected by the immense landscapes, smells and colours he encountered on his travels, as well as José Clemente Orozco's politically charged murals, he moved away from the black-and-white palette that dominated his works in the 1960s and 1970s to embrace colour and monumentality.

While Mexico was a key catalyst for Vedova's works of the 1980s, his practice remained deeply anchored in his Venetian origins. He consciously placed himself within the city's illustrious artmaking traditions, terming his large-scale paintings teleri after the monumental wall-mounted canvases that emerged in Venice in the 16th and 17th centuries in contrast to wall-based frescoes. The influence of Venice's architecture, colour, light, water and even sand are embedded in these 1980s works, the latter mixed with acrylic paint to produce textured, topographical surfaces.

Born into a family of Venetian artisans in 1919, Vedova was almost entirely self-taught as an artist. He learnt to draw by sketching the interiors of Baroque churches. He copied works by the great Venetian masters, particularly Tintoretto (1518–94), who united colour and light in sensual expressions of the human condition. Inspired by Tintoretto’s dramatic treatment of luminous space, Vedova offset his vivid hues of red, yellow and green with gestural sweeps of black and white paint, reimagining the conventions of Venetian painting through his own visionary lens of abstraction.

Now the mist is falling,
an atmosphere thought propitious
I always re-find the Venice of the mists –
Do you know what it is to be born in Venice?

— Emilio Vedova

Throughout his career, Vedova maintained his conviction in painting as a human act rooted in bodily performance. Unlike the unconscious or purely formal drive understood to underpin other forms of post-war abstraction – such as American Abstract Expressionism and European Art Informel – each gesture was, for Vedova, the result of a clear and conscious process. ‘My works are filled with structures,’ he explained, ‘these are the structures of my consciousness.’

Presented alongside works from the 1980s and 1990s are those from 2006, made in the final year of the artist’s life. These canvases are more intimate in scale, yet retain Vedova’s characteristic dynamism as his bodily exertions were re-centred on the range of mark-making made possible through direct hand contact. Here, colour itself gains form as a vehicle for embodied gesture as handprints and finger marks are drawn through thick layers of impasto, leaving behind traces of the artist’s presence.

edova understood his energetic application of materials to be a ‘release of inner propulsion’ that lay bare the emotional and psychological impulses at the heart of human behaviour – an impetus rooted in the revolutionary nature of his earlier political works of the 1960s and 1970s.