Luciano Fabro

Collection Castelli, Milan
Acquired from the above by the present owner in the mid 1990s

Venice, XXXVI Esposizione Internazionale dell'Arte, Biennale di Venezia, 1972
Lichtenstein, Kustmuseum; Linz, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Che fare?, Arte povera. The historic years, 2010-11, p. 135, illustrated in colour

Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Luciano Fabro, 1996-1997, p. 220, illustrated

Colour: the colours in catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This works is in good condition. There are two areas to the glass foot where the glue of an old repair has darkened with age, as visible in the catalogue illustration.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

"There are certain works that are born simply from a series of favourable circumstances among which it would be hard to establish any other of precedence: a critical moment in the general situation, the personal impulse of the artist, the availability of means such as money, or of instruments such as the technical capacity to produce the work or have it produced, the special resonance that the artist feels around him at the time.  The Piedi were born of a situation of this kind, but they were also the point of convergence of all the responsibilities I had been accumulating over the years which they were produced." (Luciano Fabro cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, Luciano Fabro, 1992, p. 16).

Executed 1972 and first exhibited at the Venice Biennale during the same year, the present work belongs to the final ten Piedi of the eponymous and seminal series initiated by Luciano Fabro in 1968.   Visually imposing and sumptuously fabricated, this towering structure comprises a willowy column of intricately pleated Shantung silk hung from the ceiling and rooted to the floor by a giant claw-like foot of luxuriant and expertly moulded Murano glass.  Where the earliest group of the Piedi evidence varying degrees of sculptural finish, often skirting the border between figuration and abstraction, the very last group to which the present work belongs, illustrate a heightened resolve in both material and format.  In 1981 Fabro described the development of this groundbreaking series: "I remember the first Foot was less ambitious than the second; with the second one I tried to be more concise.  In the third, the pink one, the sculpture closes off against the ground, it is more separate, more autonomous and it also has more character.  In the glass ones there is a change of technique and of appearance: between floor, stockings and the ceilings I have tried to attain the fluidity that glass demands." (Luciano Fabro cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Essen, Museum Folkwang, and travelling, Luciano Fabro, 1981).  Herein, Fabro illustrates a developmental process akin to trial and error, reaching a final resolution with the 'fluidity' of glass.  As such, belonging to the last ten constructed from Murano, Piede from 1972 represents the very apogee of this remarkably formative and substantial artistic concern.  With examples held in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, and the Museé des Beaux Artes de Nantes, the Piedi represent a pivotal moment in Fabro's artistic development: for the first time, the many layers of interpretation and complex dialogue encompassed by these works collectively expose the multivalent machine constitutive of Fabro's celebrated oeuvre.

A foremost member of the Arte Povera movement, Fabro is renowned for his aesthetic invocation of simple and banal phenomena as a means to challenge the peripheries separating art and life.  In the Piedi, Fabro continues the rudimentary investigation between space and object allied to his early work, whilst opening a dialogue between classical artistic heritage and the Baroque.  Where his earlier Spazio experiments had privileged the simplest of sculptural elements, the monumental use of traditional and luxurious materials for the Piedi ostensibly undermine the 'poor' material concern of Arte Povera.  Nonetheless, Fabro maintains a conceptually povera approach via an overarching impetus to locate a simple unity between the many levels of nature and culture that surround us.  Accordingly, through a rich framework of disparate cultural connotations, these extraordinary sculptural feet look to deconstruct the elementary relationship between viewer and artwork.

Emerging from an artistic climate charged with the impact of the Zero Group in Germany, Yves Klein in France, and most pertinently Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni in Italy, Fabro looked to build on the 'ground zero' of expressive absolution cultivated by his predecessors.  Taking on this inquiry from 1965, Fabro empirically invoked the viewer as participant within the physical space of the artwork-object by producing a number of pieces made in glass or metal, which explored the functioning of materials and forms in real space.  As outlined by Fabro: "just as a bent piece of iron expresses the force that was exerted upon it, just like a thrown stone gives a centre to the borders of a puddle, a finger indicates the direction of a gaze; in the same manner, we move by means of solicitations of impressions." (Luciano Fabro, 'Proceedings of the Milan Municipal Government, March 15, 1964', cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, Luciano Fabro, 1992, p. 27).   Thus for Fabro, art essentially becomes a vehicle for interpreting phenomenological experiences in order to perceive new planes of knowledge; a line of inquiry directly influenced by the American rationalist thinker, John Dewey. 

Greatly influential for Arte Povera, Dewey's Art as Experience outlined that via a unification of the senses a "complete interpenetration of the self and the world of objects and events" is achievable. (John Dewey, Art as Experience, New York, 1980, pp. 60-1).  Invoking Dewey's analysis as central to his artistic practice, Fabro looked to transcend hermetic rationality through an empirical encounter with his work.  Reaching a powerful height in the Piedi, tactile sensory experience and a juxtaposition of materials within space engenders a metaphysical 'sympathy' which functions to evoke a totally new and unified art experience, described by Fabro as a "third thing." (Luciano Fabro, 'Proceedings of the Milan Municipal Government, March 15, 1964', in: op. cit., p. 27).  The combination of sumptuous materials such as marble, bronze, glass and silk thus effect full-blown synaesthesia: "These feet are not an idea, but all of your ideas... Anyone who has touched these feet will have found that hands feel; anyone who has seen these feet will have observed that you can listen to stone; but those who are deaf have not thought of touching them, nor did they look at them with feeling." (Luciano Fabro, 'Aritst's Statement', Flash Art, no. 24, May, 1971, p. 5).  Within the present Piede, the contrast of towering lengths of silk against the monumental crystal-clear glass moulding evoke an instantaneous set of perceptions in which contradictory notions of verticality, tension, stability, precariousness, and fragility, masterfully converge and coexist to form a unified sensuously-elemental sculptural entity. 

Whilst relaying an elemental relationship to the senses, these remarkably multivalent works simultaneously broadcast an iconographical reading richly loaded with cultural associations. At once, the imposing monumentality and use of traditional materials evoke the historical heritage and craftsmanship of Italian sculpture.  Materials are wielded as semiotic conduits of tradition: marble is evocative of the pavements of Carrara while the use of Murano glass is unequivocally associated with Venetian craftsmanship.  Furthermore, the spatial dialogue invoked by the Piedi draw an immediate connection to the central illusionistic conceit of seventeenth-century Baroque architecture and art.  

Comparable to the way Bernini conceived his sculpture with the viewing space in mind, letting the narrative of his masterpieces unfold in time and space as directed by the artwork itself, the spatial positioning of Fabro's Piedi immediately leads and informs our sensuous and physical response. Thus, working against a heritage accountable for the most paradigmatic works of art ever created, Fabro is conscious of the shadow of ancient craftsmanship under which his sculptural practice is cast: inherent within the very titling of his Piedi is an acknowledgment of this intimidation, as from the Italian piede comes piedistallo, which translated means pedestal.  Created in tandem to the Italie series, the Piedi announce a heightened and more explicit engagement with Italian heritage.  For Fabro the work of art is like the "suitcase" of identity, one which "like all suitcases contains patrimonies which date from long ago." (Luciano Fabro cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Middelheim, Open-Air Museum of Sculpture, After the Rain, a Flower Opens, 1994, p. 62). 

A product of a cumulative artistic methodology, the esoteric Piedi are simultaneously encompassing of Fabro's previous concerns whilst affording a forecast of the conceptual complexities of his future production.  Theoretical complexity balanced with aesthetic intelligence thus posit the Piedi as a masterwork of Luciano Fabro's oeuvre.  Hailing from the very zenith of this remarkable body of work, the synaesthetic, iconographically rich, and materially resplendent quality of present Piede truly epitomizes the complex multidimensionality of this monumental four-year artistic engagement.