Pietro Consagra

Born in Mazara del Vallo in 1920 Pietro Consagra passed away in Milan in 2005. He attended the schools in Palermo and moved to Rome in 1944 where kept studying at the Academy of Fine Arts even if retired shortly before graduation, considering the institution excessively conservative. On 15 March, 1947, with Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo and Giulio Turcato, he signed the manifesto of the “Gruppo Forma”, published on the single issue of “Forma 1” magazine. Declaring themselves as “formalists and Marxists”, the young artists of “Forma 1” wanted to affirm pure form as their aesthetic value and the sole purpose of art. Starting from 1948 his idea of sculpture turned to dematerialization, to bronze little thick compositions that refused a plurality of points of view and conceiving an exclusively frontal fruition. Reached the front the presence of signs broke and began to be articulated in superpositions with voids as parts of the work. In 1964, when Pop Art was presented at the Venice Biennale, Consagra approached color and experimented with painting on nitre and aniline enamel, as a reaction to the new tendencies in art marking a step forward in his work. In the 90s he approached new projects, always consistent with the fundamental elements of his poetics: the frontal point of view applied to diverse kind of works, the dematerialization of sculpture, the relationship between sculpture and architecture. In the 90s some of his great sculptures were arranged in the streets of Milan, Rome and in the park of the Palazzo d’Orléans in Palermo.

Submitted by Galleria Fumagalli