MILAN.- Christie’s will be presenting seminal works by the leading Italian Masters in the upcoming Thinking Italian live auction in Paris on 18 October during Art Basel, Paris week. Realised in a 10-year period between1958 to1968 by Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, these works have been consigned from private collections and have not been offered at auction for decades.
Executed in 1968, Concetto spaziale, Attese is an red monochrome with four rhythmic slashes created by Lucio Fontana in the last months of his life. Begun in1958 and continuing until the artist's death in 1968, the tagli ( 'cuts') are the artist's most elegant physical embodiment of his 'Spatialist' ideology. Fontana was keenly aware of the scientific and technological advancements of the Space Age, and the new extraordinary possibilities these discoveries offered to modern mankind (estimate on request). In addition, the auction offers a second Concetto spaziale Attese in blue dating from 1961. In the same collection for 50 years, the work was bought directly from the artist in 1964 and comes now to market from a visionary Italian collection. To our knowledge it never has been publicly exhibited to date (estimate €600,000-900,000).
Created between 1958 and 1959, Achrome by Piero Manzoni is an exquisite early example. A central band of compact, horizontal folds and creases gathers over a crisp white monochrome canvas, underlining the aesthetic power and self-sufficiency of raw materials. In the same collection for 25 years, and then on loan at the Mart, the painting is one of only three comparably sized Achromes from this date, two are held in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, making this work the only such example to remain in private hands.
Further works dating from the 1960s include Domenico Gnoli's La Robe rouge painted in 1964. It is one of the earliest of his close-up paintings in which Gnoli focussed on a particular section of his subject's clothed torso, filling the entire composition with her breasts, arms and hips. The voluptuous and exaggerated curves of her body are accentuated by the various folds and plays of light. La Robe rouge was owned by the author Frédéric Dard, famous for his police novels he wrote under the pseudonym San-Antonio. Gnoli was even mentioned in one of Dard's later novels, Le mari de Léon (estimate €1,000,000-1,500,000).
Mario Schifano’s Insegna 7E-8E, one of his earlier enamelled monochrome diptychs, was painted in 1961 on shaped canvas and comes from distinctive private collections, including the Malabarba collection, fresh to the auction market, after having been included in many public exhibitions such as at the Scuderie della Pilotta and Fondazione Marconi (estimate €600,000-800,000). Schifano showed his monochrome for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 1960, and as soon as 1963 decided to move on in his artistic development. Schifano described his Monochromi as 'primal', 'signs of energy' and 'empty images' beyond 'cultural intention'.
Where Fontana broke new ground by slashing his canvases with a knife, and Manzoni did so by soaking his in kaolin solution, Enrico Castellani created monochromatic reliefs by driving nails into the underlying frames of his canvases at varying depths, and then painting on top in a single colour. This type of work, known as his Superfici or ‘Surfaces’ became Castellani’s trademark such as Dittico Nero-argento, dating from 1964 and exhibited at the Fondazione Prada in 2001, when Germano Celant and Enrico Castellani worked on the latter’s retrospective showcasing over 70 works – the work will be presented at auction with an estimate of €450,000-750,000.
Coinciding with the upcoming Arte Povera exhibition curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev at La Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection in Paris, the auction will present a sophisticated Arte Povera private collection, a refined group of eight works all executed in the decade between 1969-1979. by Giovanni Anselmo, Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Vettor Pisani, Emilio Prini, Gilberto Zorio, Giulio Paolini and Alighiero Boetti. Dama, 1967 consists of 100 “playing” pieces. Despite the work’s apparent simplicity, there is only one way to arrange the pieces in the correct order. This visual simplicity but conceptual complexity allowed Boetti to explore the ideas of order and disorder (estimate €100,000-150,000).
Alongside four further works by Alighiero Boetti coming to auction on 18 October, Dama was part of Christie’s curated exhibition "Mettere al Mondo il Mondo”, earlier this year in London, marking the 30th anniversary of Boetti’s death and spanning three decades of the artist’s career. The offering includes a rare diptych dating back to 1969, titled 16 DICEMBRE 2040 11 LUGLIO 2023 (estimate €400,000-600,000), an intense ballpoint pen work from 1991 Senza prima né dopo (estimate €350,000-500,000); a work from the very sought-after Aerei series dated from 1989 (estimate €750,000-1,000,000); and the rare work entitled Dama dating from 1967 (estimate €100,000-150,000).
The Modern art section of the auction is highlighted by two paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. Piazza d’Italia con Fontana, 1938 belongs to the long-running cycle of paintings that lies at the heart of the artist’s oeuvre. It is the only 1930s painting showing a fountain in the centre of the square (estimate €300,000-500,000).
The paintings of mannequins that de Chirico began to paint at the height of the First World War present a sequence of tragic, lonely and abandoned figures, lost in a strange melancholic world of artifice and enigma. Il Trovatore (The Troubadour) reflects de Chirico's situation when on leave of absence from the army, while he was awaiting his recall to military duty. The work for sale dates from 1948 and will be offered with an estimate of €350,000-550,000.
