Galleria Frittelli Rizzo, Milan
Simone Frittelli and Michela Rizzo are pleased to present the exhibition Dadamaino. Il lavoro, il tempo di Nouvelle Tendance [Dadamaino. The work, the Time of Nouvelle Tendance], opening on 4 March 2026, at 6 p.m., at their Milan venue in Viale Stelvio 66.
The exhibition, in collaboration with Archivio Dadamaino and curated by Flaminio Gualdoni, explores one of the most complex periods in Dadamaino's work. The artist spent many years, from 1962 to 1970, without holding any solo exhibitions, focusing instead on cultural organisation, working closely with artists such as François Morellet, Antonio Calderara, Jan Schoonhoven, and Nouvelle Tendance in general.
After the extraordinary episode of Volumi a moduli sfasati, presented in 1961 with a testimony by Piero Manzoni to Gruppo N in Padua, in 1962 Dadamaino was featured with six works in “Nul”, the major exhibition curated by Henk Peeters at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Her Rilievi are now on canvas, but more often on coloured paper and cardboard: the artist captures the radiant potential of experimentation in the climate of the time.
In these years, when she definitively adopted the name Dadamaino instead of Dada Maino, she used aluminium, plastic and Rodhoid in what an attentive scholar such as Udo Kultermann defined as “new dimensions of painting and sculpture”, not without radiant technological reinventions. Dadamaino interpreted materials and methods through the filigree of method, process, and the scientific tangents of practice, with all the logic and rhetoric that ensued: module, structure, system, programme, series, development, progression, combination, variants. In 1965, she presented the film Ricerca 1 at the third edition of “Nove Tendencije” in Zagreb, and from 1967 onwards she led the systematic and obsessive pictorial series La ricerca del colore.
Within this fervent perspective, Dadamaino nevertheless maintained one absolute principle: "Art must always be made with the hands", as she noted years later in one of her Fatti della vita. This, among other things, is the decisive aspect that differentiates her work from most of the art being produced at the time.
Dadamaino. Il lavoro, il tempo di Nouvelle Tendance
[Dadamaino. The work, the Time of Nouvelle Tendance]
curated by Flaminio Gualdoni
opening Wednesday 4 March 2026, 6 p.m.
5 March - 19 April 2026
Galleria Frittelli Rizzo
viale Stelvio 66, Milan
Opening hours:
Tuesday - Saturday, 2:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. and by appointment
tel.: 02 36504095 | e-mail: info@frittellirizzo.net