Lucio Fontana, Milão / Itália - arte informal contemporânea

Concetto Spaziale, Sculpture

Concetto Spaziale (1955), pastelli e strappi su tela

Concetto Spaziale, New York 7 (1962) brass

Concetto Spaziale (1959-60), oil on canvas

Concetto Spaziale (1962), oil on canvas

Concetto Spaziale, Sculpture

Concetto Spaziale (1958), oil and pastel on canvas

Concetto Spaziale «Attesa 140» (1960) natural canvas

(em exposição no Museu Berardo Lisboa)

Concetto Spaziale (1952), oil and pigment on cardboard

Concetto Spaziale (1962), oil on canvas

Concetto Spaziale (1952), oil and glass on canvas

Concetto Spaziale «Attese 140» (1960), water-based paint on canvas

Concetto Spaziale, Teatrino (1962), watercolor on canvas

mounted on lacquered wood

Concetto Spaziale (1965), oil on canvas

Concetto Spaziale «Attese 140» (1965), water-based

paint on canvas

Concetto Spaziale, Cupid, sculpture

Concetto Spaziale (1961), oil and rose stones on canvas

with punched holes

Concetto Spaziale (1961), water-based paint on linen

Concetto Spaziale (1952), oil and glass pebbles on canvas

Concetto Spaziale (1951), oil on canvas

Concetto Spaziale, Sculpture, cemetery in Milan

Concetto Spaziale (1968), mixed technique on paper

with holes, silver and yellow patches on blue-grey background

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Concetto Spaziale, Teatrino (1965), silkscreen with silver foil

Concetto Spaziale (1960), oil on canvas

Concetto Spaziale, Testa di fanciullo, sculpture

Concetto Spaziale (1952), oil and glass on canvas

Concetto Spaziale, Genesis (1963), oil on canvas

Concetto Spaziale, New York 2 (1962), copper

Concetto Spaziale, Teatrino (1966), oil on canvas and wood

Concetto Spaziale (1957), oil, mixed media with glitter

on canvas

Concetto Spaziale, Sculpture

Concetto Spaziale, Il Gogotha (o forme nello spazio) 1956,

olio, tecnica miste e vetri su truciolato

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Pintor, escultor e teórico italiano de naturalidade argentina, Fontana mudou-se para Milão com a sua família em 1905. Em 1922 regressou a Buenos Aires, onde estabeleceu o seu próprio atelier de escultura em 1924. Entre 1928 e 1930, estudou na Accademia di Brera. Alguns anos mais tarde abandonou as suas ligações ao grupo Novecento e em 1934 tornou-se membro do grupo Abstraction-Création, passando a fazer parte das exposições do grupo Corrente. Em 1937 revelou a sua simpatia para com as correntes neo-expressionistas que surgiam nas maiores cidades de Itália como reacção ao grupo Novecento. Durante a II Guerra Mundial, Fontana regressou à Argentina onde fundou a Academia Altamira com os artistas Jorge Romero Brest e Jorge Larco. Em finais dos anos 40, princípio de 50 optou decisivamente pela abstracção, com as suas telas monocromáticas fendidas e perfuradas. Regressou a Itália em 1948, e um dos seus áltimos trabalhos é uma série de Teatrini (pequenos teatros). Foi-lhe ainda atribuído o Grande Prémio para Pintura na Bienal de Veneza de 1966 e teve a sua primeira grande retrospectiva no Walker Art Center, em Minneapolis.

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The Berardo Collection, Museu Berardo Lisboa

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Italian painter, sculptor and ceramist, the founder of the Spazialismo movement. Born in Rosario de Santa Fé, in the Argentine, son of the Milanese sculptor Luigi Fontana and an Argentinian mother. Lived in Italy 1905-22, then again in Rosario de Santa Fé, where he opened a sculpture studio. Returned to Italy in 1928, settling in Milan and studying sculpture at the Brera Academy 1928-30. First one-man exhibition at the Galleria del Milione, Milan, 1930. Began to make abstract sculptures and ceramics and became with Licini, Melotti and others a leading figure in the Italian abstract movement. Joined the group Abstraction-Creation 1935. Spent 1939-47 in the Argentine, working part of the time in a figurative style, but in 1946 helped to found the avant-garde Altainira Academy at Buenos Aires, his ideas about the need for new art to express the modern world as revealed by science leading to the publication of the Manifiesto Blanco. Returned to Milan in 1947 and shortly afterwards issued the first Manifesto Spaziale. The Spazialismo movement founded by him was joined by Capogrossi, Crippa, Dova, Peverelli and other young artists. Made abstract paintings with Baroque arabesques of punched holes or fragments of coloured glass, and later with vertical cuts; spent the summers at Albisola Marina making ceramics. Carried out various decorative projects for buildings, including ceilings using neon. Died at Comabbio (Varese), shortly after moving there from Milan.

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Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milano

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Crítica:

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Au centre d'une toile monochrome, relativement petite, Fontana a donné, de manière extrêmement concentrée et précise, deux coups de couteau allongés et verticaux. Ses lacérations dévoilent la dimension inaccessible qui se situe derrière la peinture, le noir profond de l'espace cosmique s'ouvre. C'est par cet "attentat", esthétique il est vrai, perpétré contre la toile - une esthétique qu'on lui reproche souvent - qu'il met l'accent sur l'objet autonome. La toile n'est plus seulement support, elle ne supporte d'ailleurs plus de cadre (d'après Francisca Vandepitte, in 'Musée d'Art Moderne. Oeuvres choisies')
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"Concetto Spaziale. Attese 140" fait partie du célèbre cycle des Tagli (Lacérations) réalisé par Fontana entre 1958 et 1968. Ingénieur et sculpteur de formation, influencé par le futurisme de Marinetti et Boccioni, Fontana veut intégrer dans son oeuvre l'espace concret et la vie moderne. Avec une audace et un sens du renouveau hors du commun, cette figure de proue de l'avant-garde italienne cherche le décloisonnement des disciplines artistiques. Il réalise le premier environnement en 1949 et prépare la voie à la dématérialisation de l'objet d'art réalisé par Manzoni, Klein et le groupe Zéro (Otto Piene, ...). L'espace, le temps, la dynamique, la technique, le cosmos constituent les piliers de son oeuvre (d'après Francisca Vandepitte, in 'Musée d'Art Moderne. Oeuvres choisies')

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Musées royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique

Francis Bacon, Dublin / Irlanda do Norte - arte informal contemporânea

The Theater of the Body,

Mith and Tragedy, Head VI, 1949

Mith and Tragedy, Study after Velasquez's

portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953

Mith and Tragedy, Study of Velasquez's
portrait of Pope Innocent X

Mith and Tragedy, Study of Velasquez's
portrait of Pope Innocent X

Mith and Tragedy, Study after Innocent X, 1962

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait I

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait II

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait III

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait IV

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portait V

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait VI

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portrait VII

Mith and Tragedy, Study for Portait VIII

Mith and Tradegy, Study for a Pope III

Mith and Tragedy, Study for a Pope III

Mith and Tragedy, Study for a Pope III

Mith and Tragedy, Study of red Pope

Francis Bacon was born in 1909, Dublin and died in 1992, Madrid.

British painter whose powerful, predominantly figural images express isolation, brutality, and terror.The son of a racehorse trainer, Bacon was educated mostly by private tutorsat home until his parents banished him at age 16, allegedly for pursuing his homosexual proclivities. Self-taught as an artist, he drifted in Berlin and Paris before settling in London in 1928, after which he worked as an interior decorator. He had also begun painting, though he did so without recognition until 1945, at which time the original and powerful style displayed in such works as “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (1944) won him almost instant notoriety. His mature style emerged completely with the series of works known as “The Screaming Popes” (1949–mid-1950s), in which he converted Diego Velázquez's famous “Portrait of Pope Innocent X” into a nightmarish icon of hysterical terror.Many of Bacon's early paintings are based on images by other artists, which he distorts for his own expressive purposes. Examples of such themes are the screaming nanny from Sergey Eisenstein's film Potemkin and studies of the human figure in motion by the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Most of Bacon's paintings depict isolated figures, often framed by geometric constructions, and rendered in smeared, violent colours. He was admired for his skill in using oils, whose fluidity and mysteries he exploits to express images of anger, horror, and degradation. His later portraits and figure paintings are executed in lighter colours and treat the human face and body in a style of extreme distortion and contortion.Bacon's devotion to his art stood in curious contrast to his subject matter and the eccentric squalor of his personal life. Because he destroyed many of his early works, only a few examples can be found, mainly in American and European museums.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Crítica:

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Francis Bacon, arguably the preeminent British painter of the twentieth century, was also for forty years the most controversial. Bacon's art often appears deliberately disturbing. His subject was the human form. Bacon reinterpreted the physical construction of the body with a new and unsettling intensity. To him it was something to be taken apart by the artist's penetrating gaze and then put back together again on canvas. He forces us to see, perhaps for the first time, the separate shapes and stresses hidden in the familiar human figure.
Bacon's treatment of the face could be especially challenging. In his portraits, generally of people the artist knew well, the subjects are sometimes shown screaming. Even in repose the features shift and reshape themselves before our eyes, yet they never become unrecognizable despite the swirling paint.
Often called an Expressionist or even a Surrealist, Bacon himself strongly rejected both labels. He insisted that in its own way his work was close to the world we see every day, remaining true to what he called "the brutality of fact."

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The Theater of the Body
Perhaps the term that best describes Bacon's work is "realism," a classification that is often employed too loosely but which here is meant in a special sense. In this case, realism does not mean direct, straightforward representation—something Bacon dismissed as mere "illustration," and from which he felt as far removed as from abstract painting. Instead it means a fidelity to the vital experience of living inside the body, which for him is a fundamental theme of art. Like the realists of the nineteenth cen-tury, Bacon scrupulously recorded the mobile, shifting reality of the human form with the means that painting placed at his disposal. The difference is that by Bacon's time, a century later, the arsenal of resources for painting is much greater; naturalistic, imitative criteria are no longer sufficient. Bacon's realism is, therefore, radically modern, and his point of departure, as he freely admitted, was Pablo Picasso's work from the late l920s, which is sometimes considered Surrealist, though of an unusually tough-minded kind.
The drama in Bacon's painting arises from the fact that, inevitably, the viewer cannot help but identify to some extent with what a picture shows. The distortion of the body's ordinary appearance in a painting can make us cringe with a new and discomforting sense of how human flesh and bone are constituted. With Bacon, the figure often appears at the edge of dissolution, just prior to becoming unrecognizable. The painter concentrates all the violence of the brushstroke in the human form, using the agitated pictorial material to embody the convulsions of the flesh. To achieve this effect, Bacon at times hurls handfuls of paint against the canvas, forming it subsequently with his hands, the paintbrush, or other direct means. In these ways he affirms his presence in all its "brutality of fact."

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Myth and Tragedy:
In the evolution of Francis Bacon's art, especially in its initial stages, several motifs are repeated frequently. Some of them come from specific paintings of the past, such as the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez, the Eisenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grtinewald, or the Crucifixion by Cimabue. Others come from myths recounted in literature, as with the themes taken from the Greek tragic poet Aeschylus or from T. S. Eliot. When Bacon uses such materials, it is not a question of retelling their stories or giving a literal re-creation of earlier pictures, but rather of stripping those original structures down to their essential human content. If Bacon used themes from those sources to surround his work with an aura of tragedy, he did so in order to suggest what evoked the primal scream shown in his early canvases—the intimate violence of real things. These recurrent motifs therefore function as meeting points between one's individual life experience and a larger sense of myth—that ancestral repository which has managed to preserve forms of representation appropriate to complex, difficult subjects throughout the ages. The Crucifixions, the bullfighting scenes, and the references to tragic literature selected by Bacon thus have in common an urge to deal with conflicting feelings and unknown forces—an urge, indeed, toward catharsis. Beyond the individual interest of each work, these canvases provide the key to the type of relationship Bacon sought to establish between viewers and his paintings, something similar to the attitude we might assume before a ritual whose meaning is unknown to us.

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Head VI

The first trace in Bacon's work of the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velazquez. The primal scream is the outstanding motif of these first canvases, where nearly the entire face disappears in shadow, leaving only the mouth that utters the cry. The background is a sort of curtain of shadows from which the figure emerges.

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Study after Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
The veil placed between the viewer and the figure of the Pope crying out derives from the textures of X-ray plates that Bacon often utilized in those years. The open mouth can be understood also as the result of a relaxing of the jaw that occurs in cadavers, which would well suit the spectral aspect of this figure.

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Study after Innocent X

A later version of the Velazquez theme where the cry no longer appears. The color has become lighter, and the spatial arrangement already characteristic of Bacon is present in all its elements: the transparent cage, the perspectival space that leaves the foreground empty, drawing the viewer in. Finally, the papal throne has been synthesized into simple volumes.

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Jose Maria Faerna,

Art of the 2oth century

Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona / Espanha - arte informal contemporânea

Lligat (2006), técnica mista sobre madeira

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Mur (2006), técnica mista sobre madeira

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Muntanya Llac (2000), técnica mista sobre madeira

Arc, corda (2000), técnica mista e montagem sobre madeira

Heus aquí el cos (1997-99), técnica mista sobre madeira

Terra, manta (2000), técnica mista e montagem sobre tábua

Sabata (1995), técnica mista sobre madeira

Ventall I Ous (1996), bronze e montagem

Cara marró (2000), técnica mista sobre tela

Terra, écrits blancs (2000), técnica mista sobre madeira

Oida (2006), técnica mista sobre tela

Trapezi negre (2005), técnica mista sobre madeira

Terra, palla (2000), pintura, terra, palha e montagem sobre madeira

Esfera, cadena (1999), bronze e montagem

Peu I cistella (1999), bronze e pintura

Cames (2001), pintura, colagem e técnica mista sobre madeira

Symétrie blanche (1991), pintura e verniz sobre papel

Antoni Tàpies was born December 13, 1923, in Barcelona.

His adolescence was disrupted by the Spanish Civil War and a serious illness that lasted two years. Tàpies began to study law in Barcelona in 1944 but decided instead within two years to devote himself exclusively to art. He was essentially self-taught as a painter; the few art classes he attended left little impression on him. Shortly after deciding to become an artist, he began attending clandestine meetings of the Blaus, an iconoclastic group of Catalan artists and writers who produced the review Dau al Set.
Tàpies’s early work was influenced by the art of Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró, and by Eastern philosophy. His art was exhibited for the first time in the controversial Salo d’Octubre in Barcelona in 1948. He soon began to develop a recognizable personal style related to matière painting, or Art Informel [more], a movement that focused on the materials of art-making. The approach resulted in textural richness, but its more important aim was the exploration of the transformative qualities of matter. Tàpies freely adopted bits of detritus, earth, and stone—mediums that evoke solidity and mass—in his large-scale works.
In 1950, his first solo show was held at the Galeries Laietanes, Barcelona, and he was included in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. That same year, the French government awarded Tàpies a scholarship that enabled him to spend a year in Paris. His first solo show in New York was presented in 1953 at the gallery of Martha Jackson, who arranged for his work to be shown the following year in various parts of the United States. During the 1950s and 1960s, Tàpies exhibited in major museums and galleries throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and South America. In 1966, he began his collection of writings, La practica de l’art. In 1969, he and the poet Joan Brossa published their book, Frègoli; a second collaborative effort, Nocturn Matinal, appeared the following year. Tàpies received the Rubens Prize of Siegen, Germany, in 1972.
Retrospective exhibitions were presented at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1973 and at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, in 1977. The following year, he published his prize-winning autobiography, Memòria personal. In the early 1980s, he continued diversifying his mediums, producing his first ceramic sculptures and designing sets for Jacques Dupin’s play L’Eboulement. By 1992, three volumes of the catalogue raisonné of Tàpies’s work had been published. The following year, he and Cristina Iglesias represented Spain at the Venice Biennale, where his installation was awarded the Leone d’Oro. A retrospective exhibition was presented at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, in 1994–95. Tàpies lives in Barcelona.

Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

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Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona

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