Fausto Melotti

Eden

1 April - 20 May 2017

Zürich

Hauser & Wirth Zürich is delighted to present ‘Eden’, a newly conceived curatorial investigation of Fausto Melotti, the Italian artist often linked with titans of the post-war era, such as Alexander Calder, Lucio Fontana and Alberto Giacometti. This examination of Melotti is the first of its kind, highlighting the relationship between human and animal figures – a dynamic at the core of his practice. The exhibition spans the diverse media employed by the artist, chiefly ceramics, sculpture and works on paper, with those embracing a more gestural and suggestive representation brought to the fore.

Melotti began his sculptural practice with a distinct interest in form, weight, balance and movement, informed by his educational background in physics, mathematics and engineering. The 1950s saw a radical shift in the artist’s creative approach as he started to incorporate wire in his work – this new direction had a profound impact on the course of Melotti’s career and would occupy him until his late years. ‘Eden’ focuses on the burgeoning of this shift and takes visitors through Melotti’s lyrical and polyhedral vocabulary into a mythological and visionary terrain, as if to be among the artist’s own Garden of Eden.

Melotti turned towards the animal form as he began to focus on the creation of mythological landscapes. The work on paper ‘I Viaggi’ (The Journeys) (1951) exemplifies the artist’s interest in mystical beasts and beings: the wet, dripping tempera paint becomes a tool that blurs the dividing lines between the animal and human bodies depicted, conveying them as indivisible. ‘I Viaggi’, like many of his abstract sculptures, shows a continued interest in symmetry, maintaining compositional balance among the figures. In addition, Melotti can be seen as breaking with a definitive commitment to line and structure, leaning towards a more gestural investigation of form. The earthy hues of his colour palette – burnt ochre, teal, charcoal – evoke an abundant land, emphasising the celestial character of the figures. The artist would continue with this approach to line and colour in his late oeuvre.

The selected metal- and wire-based sculptures on view maintain a consistency with the grounding principles of Melotti’s practice, but reconsider the human figure through an investigation of proportion. ‘I giganti’ (The giants) (1969 / 1970) comprises an assembly of metal stems poised on a central foundation; fused together at the base, they support one another through equilibrium. Geometric appendages – circles, crescents, right angles – mimic human forms, suggesting a nodding head or a raised arm. Melotti’s sensitive manipulation of the metal wire renders the composition animated and joyful, and we see the artist considering the role of proportion and the physical limitations of bodily expression. ‘I giganti’ is testament to Melotti’s fascination with refining the theatrical role of the human figure through the lens of strict sculptural principles.

Behind the seemingly blithe and intuitive character of Melotti’s sculptures, resides a deep conception of art as a rigorous exercise in order and harmony, based on firm principles of geometry and musical structure. In ‘Eden’ we see how this approach led him to pursue the representation of animals and people, exploring how mathematical principles could align with the figurative and symbolic.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Fondazione Fausto Melotti will publish online the first chapter of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, going live on 30 March 2017 at www.fondazionefaustomelotti.org. This marks the beginning of the Foundation’s project to provide online access to the complete catalogue raisonné in English. Each chapter will include new material, building on the original printed content.

Installation views

About the Artist

Fausto Melotti

Italian sculptor, painter and poet, Fausto Melotti is considered a pioneer of Italian art and is acknowledged for his unique contribution to the development of mid-century European Modernism. Coming of age in prewar Milan, and living through the horrors of the Second World War, Melotti metabolized wartime devastation in his work by returning to Renaissance principles of harmony, order, geometry, and musical structure, which he integrated into a highly personal yet universally accessible artistic language that expresses the full range of emotional experiences in modern human existence.

Before turning to art, Melotti studied music, mathematics and engineering—disciplines that exerted clear influence upon his distinctive practice across subsequent decades. Melotti trained as a figurative artist, studying under Italy’s leading Symbolist sculptor Adolfo Wildt at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. There he befriended fellow pupil Lucio Fontana in 1928, and in the following decade shifted his focus to abstraction and a new non-objective art. Melotti developed influential friendships with the Rationalist architects of Gruppo 7 and the abstract artists who gravitated around Galleria Il Milione. With Fontana, he joined the ‘Abstraction-Création’ movement, developing firm ideas about non-figurative art. Influenced by his education in engineering and music, Melotti’s first abstract sculptures were geometrical, and echoed the young artist’s academic training in order, rhythm, proportions and form.

Melotti’s ceramics of the 1940s respond to the pain, trauma, and despair that crowded his thoughts in the aftermath of the Second World War. Aerial bombings destroyed the artist’s studio in Milan and profoundly altered his artistic vision, precipitating a literal and symbolic rupture in his idealized pursuit of abstraction. His attention shifted to the craft and production of ceramics and terracotta. Rendered in polychromatic glazes, the enigmatic figures in these works illustrate the artist’s urgent and necessary return to figuration.

By the 1960s, Melotti had returned to sculpture, using a new language built upon delicate threads and thin sheets of brass, iron, and gold to express a more resolved and distinctly humanist sensibility. Delicately wrought, almost fragile constructions became enriched by a new narrative, dream-like and symbolic. These weightless works resemble aerial drawings incorporating space, air and transparency. His later work of the 1970s and 1980s is characterized by rhythmic geometric forms with an underlying humanist narrative that curator Douglas Fogle describes as ‘quivering just on the threshold between the solidity of figuration and the immateriality of abstraction.’