Agostino Bonalumi

Private Collection, Bologna

Koelliker Collection, Milan

Robilant & Voena, London

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2014

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some extremely minor wear to the top left and bottom right corner tips. Further inspection reveals some tiny hairline cracks with associated minute losses to the bottom right protruding element. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Nero is a salient paradigm of Agostino Bonalumi’s celebrated Pittura Oggetto, famously coined as such by art critic Gillo Dorfles in 1966. Artists of this movement, which also included luminaries such as Lucio Fontana and Enrico Castellani, Dorfles commented, went beyond the figurative and the abstract, in order to stress and explore the object-nature of paintings. The matte black surface of Nero, and the lack of external signifiers, confirms its status as an autonomous object in and of itself. Executed in 1967, the present work stems from a seminal year in Bonalumi’s career. Gaining increasing international success he was invited to exhibit at the São Paolo Biennale and the Biennale of Young Artists in Paris, whilst also opening his first solo show in the United States at the Galeria Bonino. The year before Bonalumi partook in the 33rd Venice Biennale, where he exhibited a selection of works together with Paolo Scheggi, while in 1970 he was given his own personal room at the 35th Venice Biennale. Today Bonalumi’s works are included in many prestigious permanent collections, including the Civico Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

A paragon of Bonalumi’s distinct artistic production, Nero is a towering monument of serene simplicity. The ineluctable smoothness of the impenetrable black surface stands in harmonious synergy with the sensuous curved edges of the central extroflexions. The two corporeal shapes, entwined in a close embrace, purport a stunning aesthetic balance of symmetry and poise. Imbued with an autonomy and life of their own through a dialogue with ambient space, they transcend the traditionally flat canvas ground. Herein, Bonalumi invites the viewer not only to scrutinise the space of the work of art itself, but also its surrounding environs. This was described by Alberto Fiz as the "poetics of expansion, where the work, set to spill into the surrounding space, becomes itself a setting, a tangible place, a physical experience" (Alberto Fiz quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, Catanzaro, Museo Marca, Agostino Bonalumi, 2014, p. 23).

As with Bonalumi’s most important works, Nero moves beyond traditional concepts of painting and takes the medium into an utterly new dimension. By challenging the basic tenets of artistic production he aligned himself with some of the key players of the Italian avant-garde. Looking to his artistic forbearer and pioneer of an almost nihilistic reduction of painting, Lucio Fontana, Bonalumi sought to expose a phenomenological inner-language through a heightened dedication to the very elemental components of ‘painting’. While aligned with the contemporaneous aims of Yves Klein and the ZERO Group, it was Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani with whom Bonalumi shared the greatest artistic affinity, co-founding the legendary Galleria Azimuth and Azimut journal in 1959. Nonetheless, where Manzoni sought plastic expression for a renunciation of artistic agency, and Castellani imparted endless spatial experiences through light and shadow, Bonalumi scrutinised the sculptural dimensionality of the canvas through his ‘painting-objects’. Existing on the cusp between sculpture and painting, Nero aptly purports this notion of painting-as-object and is a resplendent apotheosis of Bonalumi's radical pursuit of a new dimension in art.