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Taking place on May 15 is a landmark auction of radical mid-centuryItalian and American artworks from the personal collection of Daniella Luxembourg.
Lucio Fontana, ‘Concetto Spaziale, La Fine di Dio’
Through lacerated cavities, impassioned apertures and the ghost of the artist’s own hand clawing at the canvas, Lucio Fontana plumbs the absolute limits of painting as he assails the burnished bronze of Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio’s lustrous surface, thus asserting his most powerful contribution to 20th century art: the rupture of the picture plane. Executed in 1963, the present work ranks among the most significant of La fine di Dio, or “The End of God,” paintings, which represent the utter apex of his artistic enterprise. Of the 38 works in the series, Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio is the third to be recorded in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, and is one of just 10 rarified examples executed with glitter – others of which reside in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan.
Claes Oldenburg, ‘Soft Switches’
In Claes Oldenburg’s radical Soft Switches from 1964/69, the artist renders a quintessential modern household technological fixture obsolete through a seemingly malleable, organic and strikingly anthropomorphic three-dimensional embodiment. Soft Switches is among the most exceptional manifestations of Oldenburg’s revolutionary deconstruction of the hegemony of sculpture through iconizing ordinary objects. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, against the grain of the dominating Abstract Expressionist movement, Oldenburg rejected abstraction in favor of an idiosyncratic exploration of archetypes of the mundane. Soft Switches is a paradigmatic example of the artist’s seminal early works, encapsulating Oldenburg’s refashioning of quotidian functional objects into artifacts of an impending bygone era, imbued with emotional resonance.
Alexander Calder, ‘Armada’
Triumphantly exhibited in Alexander Calder’s seminal 1947 exhibition at Bucholz Gallery, NY, Armada from 1946 is an early and important example of the artist’s corpus of mobiles, representing Calder’s celebrated return to working freely with sheet metal after the conclusion of World War II. Famously pictured with the artist in an iconic photograph by Herbert Matter, the present work is a feat of construction and complexity of form, as a fleet of matte-black elements surging along a meridian of scarlet rods: the weight, gravity and intensity of Armada’s abstract elements channel the strength and naval fortitude of its very namesake. Armada also bears exceptional provenance, having formerly belonged in the permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art before residing in the distinguished collection of French filmmaker Claude Berri. Held for the last two decades in the personal collection of Daniella Luxembourg, Armada ranks among the most arresting of Calder’s creations, summoning his proficiency and intuitive vision.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, ‘Maria nuda’
Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Maria nuda exemplifies the conceptual rigor and poetic resonance of the artist's iconic Quadri specchianti, or Mirror Paintings. Created in 1969, a pivotal year in the artist’s career, Maria nuda depicts Maria Pioppi, Pistoletto’s muse and partner, in a pose reminiscent of classical art historical precedents like Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque or Édouard Manet’s Olympia.
Alberto Burri, ‘Nero Cretto’
A monumental expanse of obsidian black splintering before the viewer, obliterating its own image, Alberto Burri’s Nero Cretto from 1976 offers neither picture nor portal, instead exploring the poetics of material degradation in an ingenious act of creative invention. Spanning 2.5 meters in width, the incredible monumentality of Nero Cretto invites its spectator to revel in its calamitous surface, scored into thirds as if summoning the format of Renaissance triptychs and altarpieces. The present work ranks among the most impressive and dramatic of Burri’s Cretti paintings, belonging to a rare and limited group of 38 large-scale examples which measure more than 100 centimeters on both sides.
