NEW YORK, NY.- This spring Phillips will present the first-ever auction dedicated to modern Italian art to take place at a major auction house in New York. Driven by internationally prominent curator Francesco Bonami, the auction titled, The Great Wonderful: 100 Years of Italian Art, will reflect the depth of Italian art over the last 100 years and will present 64 works by both internationally renowned artists, and by those who are currently less familiar to an international audience of collectors.

With the auction, Francesco Bonami will bring to the foreground an even broader spectrum of Italian art, showcasing artists from the early 1900’s through to recent figures. By introducing a major Italian sale to New York, Phillips addresses the increased attention, curiosity and appetite for Italian art that has developed over the last two decades. Phillips and Bonami align in their belief that collectors have only witnessed the tip of the vast iceberg of lesser known Italian artists. This sale represents their collective endorsement of the growing market for Italian art that aims to go beyond the economic value of the sale to reinforce the true and overlooked strength of Italian artists on the international panorama.

The sale will offer 64 lots with a pre-sale low estimate of $20.7m / £13.8m / €19m and a total high estimate of $28.2m / £18.9m / €26m

“I am proud to present this sale giving collectors the chance to discover more about Italian art from the 20th and 21st centuries. The sale is going to be a new journey into the endless and surprising world of 100 years of Italian art. Never before has a century looked so contemporary.” Francesco Bonami, Curator.

Details were Domenico Gnoli’s main obsession and the focus of his most complete achievements as a painter. In Shirt Collar Size 14 ½ the artist manages to uncover a fresh and original component of the painted medium with a sculptural dimension similar to Baroque artist Lorenzo Bernini’s perfection of the details in his marble masterpieces. In this one painting, Gnoli combines the multiple conceptual informants of painting and sculpture, these “radically different” media, while never diluting one or the other, nor conflating the two. The collar is now a fragment of the whole of the shirt, reminiscent of that which graces the back of Benjamin Franklin’s marble portrait by Jean Antoine Houdon. The canvas, with its sandy and grainy texture, is like the heavily worked surface of a Robert Ryman canvas while the measure of the collar assumes a quasi-conceptual dimension like the date in an On Kawara painting or one of the numbers in Mario Merz’s Fibonacci series. The white shirt, which was most probably residing ironed and well-folded in a drawer of his closet, or on a shelf at a department store, enlarged and magnified as it is on the canvas, becomes a universal image freed from any possible limiting narrative. It reflects both fashion and culture. It represents both purity and elegance. It’s rigorous and humble. It is a Symbol that Gnoli has been able to create within the natural and conventional space of a painting.

The work of Giuseppe Penone is as multifaceted and mysterious as the natural world from which he draws his genius. Through his handling of various media, he lifts a veil to expose the obscurities by which we are confounded and mesmerized in the world. He actively and successfully sought to investigate the intimate and daring space between art and nature. Since 1969, Penone has been one of the foremost figures of the Arte Povera movement, which emphasized a fundamental break with conventional artistic mediums. Penone selected organic material as his chosen medium and concentrated in particular on the qualities, both aesthetically and intrinsically, of the tree. The tree, like the human figure, grows vertically with expansive arms and a tall crown, however instead of walking freely the tree remains rooted to the earth. Trees have persisted as a central theme for Penone, inspired early on by the forests near his home in Turin, Italy and Idee di pietra represents a magnificent monument for the artist. The tree, expressive, and while not ambulatory certainly upwardly mobile, resists the mass of the stone, the idea of gravity, of the weight of the world. Penone has transformed his usual natural wooden support into one of bronze, mimicking the organic form with which he is most closely associated. The result is jarring and revelatory, expressive and contemplative, a perfect amalgamation of the conceits which have been driving the artist’s production since its inception.

“The sons of Adam are limbs of each other / Having been created of one essence,” so reads the Persian text that runs around the perimeter of this Mappa by Alighiero Boetti. Hardly could he have known that the artisans with which he collaborated on this work could have picked so apt a couplet to represent the artist and his oeuvre. A seminal member of the Arte Povera movement, Boetti was fascinated by the duality of the world and the manner in which the physical materials of his process could reflect the intricacies of that world. The couplet quoted is from the Bani Adam and is one of the most famous in classical Persian poetry by the most famous poet, Sa’adi. Just as Sa’adi recognized that multifaceted nature of humankind, so too did Boetti wish to embody a unified oneness, but a wholesomeness that simultaneously acknowledged all of its component parts. Similarly, his Mappa, being an embroidery as it is, physically manifests this central theme of multifaceted oneness that permeates Boetti’s oeuvre. Even in its relation to time, Boetti’s Mappa reflects and embodies an incredible depth and sensitivity – not atemporal but rather operating in and of many “times” at once. Depicting an historical narrative but read in the now, the work is both a contemporary commentary as well as a document of the past. The other half of the surrounding inscription sums it “Alighiero and Boetti, in time, on time, with time and/or the temporal.”

Giacomo Manzù has been able to transform an ancient figure like that of a cardinal of the Catholic Church residing in the Vatican, behind the secret walls of Saint Peter’s Basilica, into a enigmatically contemporary, abstracted figure. Cardinals and popes have always been the portrait subjects of the most famous artists from the Renaissance and Baroque periods and beyond, but Manzù looks at these figures, these characters, from a futuristic point of view, aliens residing among the mortal human realm. The impressive height of this unique Cardinale in piedi, 1958-60, gives the subject the same presence as the black Monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking film 2001: A Space Odyssey, from 1968. The cinematic aspect of this work also inspired film director Federico Fellini for his grotesque representation of nuns and cardinals in one of the most famous scenes from his 1972 movie Roma, in which models dressed as cardinals with their mitres (the familiar pointed hat of their position) walk the red carpet in a lookalike fashion show for religious garments. Manzù combines spirituality and caricature in a magical fashion, keeping distance from the banality of provocation and also from the risk of blind worship. The figure maintains his intimidating dimension while never becoming a dead monument or overwhelming monstrosity. Cardinale in piedi appears to us as a form of human architecture, a giant and a pillar at the same time.

Maurizio Cattelan’s most endearing identity is that of the iconoclast and of the provocateur. From the early to the mid-1990s his work challenged the political and social Italian status quo, mixing the sacred with the profane. Such provocation is superbly reflected in Untitled (Christmas ’95) from 1995. To unpack the symbolism embedded in the work is to realize the subversive nature of the artist’s oeuvre and of this work specifically. The shooting star is the symbol of Christianity, leading the Three Kings to Jesus’s grotto, while “BR” is the ominous symbol of the violent terrorist group, the Brigate Rosse, or Red Brigade, that subverted civil order in Italy between the early 1970s and the early 1980s. Both the shooting star and the BR represent a moment of transformation – the first, through love and peace, the second with violence and hate. Conflating the two, Cattelan creates a third symbol where the two souls of Italians’ identity are juxtaposed and combined, revealing the contradiction of their own selves. This early work already contains all of Cattelan’s concerns that will appear in subsequent pieces, most notably in HIM, the reduced portrait of Hitler kneeling and praying, where again love and hate are forced into the same space, effecting a puzzling and disturbing reaction among viewers. In Untitled (Christmas ’95), Cattelan is also referencing the neon work of Bruce Nauman, an artist who similarly used words in ways opposite to their nature and meaning in order to enhance the viewer’s awareness about common thought and feeling. Untitled (Christmas ’95), in its bare simplicity, remains a seminal work within this accomplished oeuvre.

Fausto Melotti has given a sculptural form to the invisibility and ethereality of poetry. In La Pioggia, Rain, one of the largest sculptures by the artist, the physical act of raining is transformed into a religious space where people worship the drops of water forming a skeleton-like volcano. The cloud from where the water is pouring appears as if a halo, or a god-eye, while the puddles forming on the ground look like reflections of that self-same halo above. The sculpture has, in and of itself, become a dance and a celebration of rite that propitiates and welcomes the arrival of the rain. Many artists since Melotti have been similarly inspired by water and the rain – among them Gabriel Orozco with his photos of puddles and Urs Fischer with his acid colored rain drops scattered from the ceiling. Like Alexander Calder, Melotti makes instability the focus of his art. Everything, both in the art and in response to it, is unstable and because of that, all is magic. La Pioggia is magic, transparent, the very essence of simplicity, yet has the strength, the power, and the mystery of the graffiti in the Paleolithic caves. Melotti’s La Pioggia is ancient and contemporary at the same time; it’s about the ritual of creation; it’s about nature. That same physical miracle, according to the artist, is nothing but a screen through which God be seen, or behind which He can hide.

An influential prefigure to Conceptual Art, Piero Manzoni’s ground breaking artistic practice wryly and acutely questioned the nature of the art object. There is a strong underlying conceptual dialogue throughout Manzoni’s practice that represents a meticulous investigation into the possibilities of the painted surface. In an effort to defy narrative, Manzoni emphasized the surface of his works through the use of raw materials that transformed themselves into a work of art, thus removing the mark of the artist’s hand and allowing the material to act as protagonist as it completes itself without his direct intervention.

Produced in direct response to Yves Klein’s monochromes, Manzoni’s series of colorless works eliminated any and all narrative, metaphor and allusion through a process that allowed the materials to articulate their own formal and intrinsic properties. Known as Achromes and appearing white, these works were in fact colorless, or “achromatic” and as such represented a negation of painting. The present Achrome is a stunning example of Manzoni’s late works from the series, created just one year before his death. This work consists of a tuft of artificial fiber that has been adhered to red velvet. Although in actual fact this work has color and texture, it functions according to the same principles of his earlier white works in the way that all extraneous detail and style is eliminated, leaving only the presence of the raw material, the self-determined pure signifier highlighting the “a-chromatic” meaning of the work.