Pietro Consagra “Immagini Vaganti”

Sicilian sculptor Pietro Consagra was one of the great protagonists of Italian art after World War II. A pioneer of the renewal of abstract sculpture, beginning in the 1960s Consagra freed the latter from superstructures and preconceptions in favor of a direct encounter between work and viewer.

The exhibition stems from the research conducted by the curator Paola Nicolin on a specific body of works by Consagra, better known as “Lenzuoli” (Bed sheets): paintings executed with homemade washable colors on cotton fabrics that the artist produced since 1967. As Consagra was developing a practical and theoretical discourse on the thickness of sculpture, new intuitions converged into this lesser-known series, in which the artist exploited painting as a free and liberatory field for experimentation. Consagra was painting “Immagini Vaganti” (wandering images) – as he wrote in 1974 in the introduction to the exhibition Variazioni di Pietro Consagra. “Quattro lenzuoli dipinti a mano” at the Milan Galleria Multicenter – in contrast with his radical choice of a frontal sculpture.