On the occasion of Art Basel – Paris 2025, Frittelli arte contemporanea (Florence) proposes a solo booth retrospectively dedicated to Dadamaino's Volumi [Volumes].
The Volumi, which mark the artist's debut within the Azimut group, date to the period 1959-1960, that of the maximum intensity of his relationship with Piero Manzoni. It is a fervent period in which Dadamaino, faithful to the obsessive and continuous way of working that will characterize her whole life, implements a continuous experimenting and exploring new operative possibilities.
The exhibition is organised under the aegis of the Opera Dadamaino Archive and will be accompanied by a publication, with texts in Italian, French and English, edited by the director of the Archive, Flaminio Gualdoni.
The Volumi
The rejection of pictorial practice, the adoption of monochrome and the consequent adoption of the canvas as an "object" lead her to conceive new works in which the canvas is subjected to one or more subtractions of the matter that determine large holes or blanks in the surface, according to an inspiration that harks back to Lucio Fontana's Concetti spaziali [Spatial Concepts].
The surface of the canvas is severely compromised. The subtractions initially concern the entire area of the painting and appear to be irregular in shape, such as to show the wooden frame behind it or the wall. At the same time, the phenomenology of this cycle presents more subtractions in an oval or circle shape. The canvas can be left raw or colored in a monochrome sense, mostly black or white.
From the summer of 1960 the holes become multiple and regular, of a geometric nature and the artist places a canvas background on the frame, on the back, so as to create a uniform background for the holes. The artist calls these works "Volumes" because the large blank reveal a space beyond the canvas, an unexpected depth and the surface of the wall behind it, which interacts with the work, determines continuous perceptual variations, even in a three-dimensional sense.
The Volumi are not attested, as far as exhibitions are concerned, in 1958, but were executed at the end of that year, as the artist has repeatedly reiterated, and exhibited only after a long period of "incubation". In fact, they were exhibited publicly for the first time on December 18, 1959 at the group show La Donna nell'arte contemporanea [Woman in Contemporary Art] at the Brera Gallery in via Brera 14 in Milan and four days later at the group show of Azimut with Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele Devecchi, Enzo Mari, Manfredo Massironi, Alberto Zilocchi.