Archipenko in Italy

The exhibition, titled Archipenko in Italy, presents a selection of the artist’s sculptures, drawings and sculpto-paintings and is organized in collaboration with Stephenson art and with the support of the Archipenko Foundation and the family of the artist, which will lend a number of works to the show.

The sculptor’s works will be presented together with those of the artists who were most inspired by his example, including Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Alberto Magnelli, Enrico Prampolini, Fortunato Depero, Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà.

Many of the Futurists became friends with Archipenko in Paris at the beginning of the 1900s. His research in the field of avant-garde art was championed by Blaise Cendrars, André Salmon and Guillaume Apollinaire, the latter of whom was actually fired from his job at the newspaper where he worked in 1914 for defending Archipenko’s works in its pages. The sculptor’s relations with Alberto Magnelli are less well known, but highly significant. In 1914 at the Salon des Indépendants, Magnelli bought three of Archipenko’s most famous (and radical) works. Among these was Boxers, an example from the bronze edition on display at ML Fine Art.

Archipenko’s unabated formal experimentations and his relations with the Futurists already before 1914 favored the spread of his fame in Italy. Particularly important was his invention of sculpto-painting which, starting from Cubist and Futurist research on the process of assemblage, arrived at a new form of multi-material art intended to bring together painting and sculpture. As Maria Elena Versari has suggested, and as other leading scholars in the field have reiterated, Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà were inspired by Archipenko’s sculptures to create the famous mannequins that characterize Metaphysical Painting. In 1920, with his one-man show at the Venice Biennale, the sculptor’s fame was definitively consecrated and he became the reference point for a generation of artists who, although linked to the avant-garde, did not shy away from the representation of the human body and its representation.