THE EXHIBITION
“Consagra. Seduction and Freedom of Painting” is an exhibition curated by Sergio Troisi in collaboration with the Consagra Archive in Milan. It is a project supported and promoted by the Fondazione Sicilia.
The over 40 paintings on display dialogue with some of the artist’s sculptures through a lively comparison between painting and sculpture resulting out of the undivided uniqueness of Consagra’s inspiration.
Echoes of artists such as Matisse, Soldati and even Calder resound in Consagra’s pictorial production. Pietro Consagra adapts these suggestions combining them with the historical assumptions of his work, namely the frontality of figural elements and the exploration of the feeling of colour.
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Two aluminum Piani Appesi open the exhibition, which continues in the other rooms with paintings in which figural elements are arranged by variation sequences (Dark Blue Background – twenty-four images, Aqua Green Background – thirty images, Purple Background – twenty-five images), bringing to mind the components of an imaginary alphabet closely related with material items like the veining of stones, marble, and onyx such as in Horizontal Libeccio and Chinese Green.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE ARTIST
Pietro Consagra (Mazara del Vallo, 1920 – Milan, 2005) was one of the most important artists on the Italian and international art scene in the second half of the 20th century. Sculptor, painter, theorist, and architect of the Frontal City buildings, he joined Gruppo Forma which, in 1947, promoted formalism and abstraction to become the key features of a renewed modern language.
Consagra, after his constructivist works of those years, at the beginning of the 1950s started the ten-year cycle of the Colloqui, where he clearly expressed the stern gravity of the period following the tragedy of the II World War. This work sanctioned his international success at the 1960 Venice Biennale where he was awarded with the Grand Prize for Sculpture. The absence of hierarchy and the
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principle of frontality typical of the Colloqui would be further elaborated, since the end of the 1960s, in the Frontal City and in the buildings he designed for the new Gibellina, including the large Stella del Belice and Meeting, where he applied the two-frontal perspective, another typical feature of his sculptures.
