On Thursday, June 3rd, 2021, PIASA will present several works of art by various sculptors, painters and visual artists at its second Modern and Contemporary Art auction, including a stunning one-off piece by Mark di Suvero.
Born in 1933 in Shanghai to Italian parents, Mark Di Suvero and his family moved to California in the early 1940s. After studying art and philosophy, he moved to New York in 1957, founded a community gallery, the March Gallery, and in 1960 exhibited his first sculptures at the Green Gallery, made from salvaged materials and raw wood from destroyed Manhattan buildings. Following an accident that paralysed him for two years, Di Suvero devoted himself exclusively to steel and created monumental installations using cranes and presses (Are Years What? - for Marianne Moore).
In the 1970s, he left the United States in opposition to the Vietnam War. He settled in France in Chalon-sur-Saône and created an association that brought together sculptors on a barge moored in a shipyard. He exhibited his monumental sculptures in 1975 in a major exhibition at the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. In the United States, where he returned in 1975, he continued his civic struggle by creating the Socrates Sculpture Park Foundation in New York, and by installing monumental sculptures in underprivileged areas. Di Suvero's work and approach to materials refer to the Russian constructivist sculpture of the 1920s, by Tatline, Rodchenko and Gabo, but he combines it with a formal freedom more reminiscent of the steel sculptures of Julio Gonzalez and Picasso.
Mark di Suvero (born 1933)
Dream come true, 1990
Estimate : 80 000 - 120 000 €
Our work, Dream come true (1990), shows how he has gradually enriched his plastic language, to integrate circular forms, acute angles, through complex compositions exploring notions of balance, movement with lightness. Their strength lies in a play of balance of opposites, while maintaining a strong dialogue with architecture.
Di Suvero has received numerous public commissions to create monumental sculptures in urban spaces in the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia. In Paris, in the autumn of 1997, he took part in temporary but no less striking events at the esplanade des Invalides and the Parc de La Villette. The artist's talent has been recognized by several institutions around the world, notably in New York at the Whitney Museum in 1975, at the Storm King Sculpture Park in 1985, at the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Nice in 1991, at the Venice Biennale in 1995, at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in 2001 and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2013.
