EMILIO VEDOVA

Emilio Vedova was born on August 9, 1919, in Venice.
A Self-taught artist, he briefly attended evening decoration classes at the Carmini confraternity building. In around 1942 he joined the Corrent group, which also included Renato Birolli, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti, and Umberto Vittorini.
In 1946 he collaborated with Morlotti on the Oltre Guernica manifesto in Milan and was a founding member of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti in Venice. During this period, he began his Geometrie nere series, black and white paintings influenced by Cubist spatiality.
In 1951 he was awarded the prize for young painters at the first São Paulo Bienal. In 1952 he participated in the Gruppo degli Otto. Vedova was represented at the first Documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1955 and won a Guggenheim International Award in 1956. He executed his first lithographs in 1958.
Vedova was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the 1960 Venice Biennale. The same year he created moving light sets and costumes for Luigi Nono’s opera Intolleranza ’60. This experience led to the first Plurimi in 1961–63: freestanding, hinged, and painted sculpture/paintings made of wood and metal.
For the Italian Pavilion at Expo ’67, Montreal, he created a light-collage using glass plates to project mobile images across a large asymmetric space.
From the late 1970s, he experimented with a variety of techniques and formats, such as the Plurimi-Binari (mobile works on steel rails), monotypes, double-sided circular panels (Dischi), and large-scale glass engraving.
In 1995 he began a new series of multifaceted and manipulable painted objects called Disco-Plurimo. Vedova died in Venice on October 25, 2006.

Submitted by GALLERIA STEFANO FORNI