Dadamaino

(Italian, 1935-2004)

Volume a moduli sfasati
1960

Footnotes

This work is registered in the Archivio Dadamaino, Milan, under no. 102/13, and is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity.

Provenance
Galleria Plurima, Udine
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner circa 1985


Volume a moduli sfasati, (Volume Modules Offset) from 1960, is a magnificent and rare example of one of Dadamaino's early explorations into space, perception, and the immaterial world. Composed of three translucent layers of perforated plastic fabric, these are superimposed one on top of the other, with the first two layers in direct contact and the third slightly recessed back in the frame. The holes do not match up precisely, rather they overlap each other creating ellipses which allow the viewer to catch glimpses directly through the artwork, and this was a very deliberate aim of the artist as she stated in 1960: "I placed the hand punched perforated layers on the frame. The warmth of my hand moved the holes, and this shift was the result of chance." These apertures are constantly changing and morphing according to one's position, and despite this work being physically static, one cannot but feel movement and energy when engaging with it.

Eduarda Emilia Maino, known as Dadamaino, was born in Milan in 1930. She became inspired to create art after a chance encounter with one of Lucio Fontana's iconic canvases in Milan in the late 1950s. Her name came by mistake: when showing in the Netherlands in 1961, her first name 'Dada' (the diminutive of Eduarda) was printed next to her surname 'Maino' without a space, creating the iconic portmanteau we know her by today.

Dadamaino's earliest works were called the Volumi, and were started in 1958. They featured the artist cutting out large organic shaped voids directly out of monochrome canvases. From the very start, Dadamaino was not interested in creating conventional paintings, and she shunned traditional criteria like composition, the illusion of depth, and perspective, in favour of more spatial principles such as form, volume, and space. These works, and indeed the artist's early practice, were a response to the new territory covered by Lucio Fontana's Concetti Spaziali or Spatial Concepts. Fontana's slashed canvases were iconoclastic rips in the very fabric of art and tradition, a renunciation of the picture plane in search of a new dimension and an art appropriate to the epoch of space exploration. An avid follower of Fontana, Dadamaino used his philosophy as the conceptual framework for her art, and developed a practice that was at the cutting edge of Italian avant-garde production. By 1959, Dadamaino had become affiliated with the hugely influential Azimuth Gallery which had been founded by Post-War titans Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, and Agostino Bonalumi, and had close associations with Germany's ZERO group. Within this radical and critical environment, Dadamaino was able to crystallise her ideas and her aesthetic became more controlled and ordered, with the present work being a prime example. Being one of a handful of female artists in the avant-garde circles of Post-War Italy (along with Carla Accardi and Marisa Merz), she became an iconic figure who was hugely influential and paved the way for the next generation of contemporary artists.

Indeed it was after she joined Azimuth that she started the Volumi a moduli sfasati series, from which the present work derives. This work may retain the veneer of a traditional painting, but far from it, this is a radical and disruptive response to Painting as an entity. The key here is that by perforating the plastic sheeting, and inviting the viewer to look through the surface, Dadamaino has shifted its function: the sheet is no longer a support for content, rather it is the content. By adopting this radical stance, Dadamaino hoped to return Painting to what she called the Tabula Rasa, a conceptual blank slate deprived of any bourgeois rhetoric, allowing for a purer and less reactionary form of expression. The result is that the present work is a self-reflexive picture, that calls into question its own space and volume. The choice of material in this work is also very deliberate: plastics had only just become widely available in the 60s, and to use such an industrial and 'futuristic' material on such a historically entrenched medium was a singularly radical act.

Pittura Oggetto (object painting) was the term coined by artist and philosopher Gillo Dorfles to describe the radical output of Dadamaino and her avant-garde colleagues such as Enrico Castellani, Agostino Bonalumi, and Paolo Scheggi. Whilst those three manipulated the surfaces of their paintings to protrude outwards towards the viewer in an almost sculptural manner, Dadamaino was more interested in the more philosophical task of articulating the notion of void and emptiness, and the present work is a wonderful manifestation of this ethos. Volume a moduli sfasati, was not only a rare series which was only worked on between 1960 and 1961, but also a transitional one. In the early 1960s, Dadamaino shifted her focus towards creating optically engaging works and Volume a moduli sfasati can be understood as the origin of this new direction, the delicate and subtle optical effect of the layered plastic fabric providing the artist with inspiration to develop her artistic production.