The sale "Art (s) + Design: An important private European collection" that PIASA auction house organize on September 26, 2019 will highlight one of the most active members of Arte Povera, Claudio Parmiggiani (born in 1943) represented by two pieces made in 1968 and 1996.
After studying, from 1958 to 1960 at the Institute of Fine Arts in Modena, Claude Parmiggiani moved to Bologna where he attended the studio of the painter and engraver Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) who was himself very close to the futurists group with whom he exhibited in Rome in 1914.
Since the 1960s, Claudio Parmiggiani has been developing a poetic work nourished by a great diversity of materials and practices (burns, prints, ashes, dust, light). The questions that his work addresses are related to the disappearance, forgetting, destruction and the eminently moving and fleeting structure of memory.
Like the installation Crypta presented from 1994 to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Geneva (Mamco) and in which the visitor experienced a state close to that of blindness, the contours of the objects figured in "Sans title, Cenere, circa "seem on the verge of disappearing.
Between the separations left in reserve and evoking a succession of shelves, the chromatic nuances of the canvas were obtained with smoke and soot. Around the fragility and the ephemeral, through this work - which is not without evoking the influence of the parietal art - the artist associates his speech with the materials that he uses.
Entitled "Pot 815, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, 1968-Francesco Sforza Bembo", the second piece offered for sale is a juxtaposition of two postcards annotated on the back. While the first image evokes one of the iconic works of the French plastic artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud (born in 1939), the second is a reproduction of a portrait of Francesco Sforza painted in the middle of the quattrocento by Bonifacio Bembo and currently preserved in the Pinacoteca de Brera in Milan.
Member of Arte Povera, formed by a painter close to futurists, Claudio Parmiggiani has developed a work in which references to the heritage of Italian culture are present.
Subject of several exhibitions and retrospectives across Europe, the art of Claudio Parmiggiani was brilliantly analyzed in 2001 in a book by Georges Didi-Huberman, "Genius of non-place. Air, dust, footprint, haunting”.
