(Vimercate/Monza 1935–2013)
Arancione, 1971, signed, dated on the reverse Bonalumi Mi71, vinyl tempera on shaped canvas, 100 x 85 x 14 cm, on stretcher

Photo Certificate:
Archivio Bonalumi, Milan, archive no. 71–024, with the artist’s signature

Provenance:
Luciano Silva, Seregno (inscribed on the stretcher)
Galleria Leonardo da Vinci, Lecco (stamp on the stretcher)
Galleria Michelangelo, Bergamo (label and stamp on the stretcher)
Studio Gariboldi, Milan
Robilant+Voena, London
Private Collection, Europe

Exhibition:
London, Robilant+Voena, Bonalumi. All the Shapes of Space 1958–1976, 4 October – 15 November 2013, exhib. cat., Skira-Rizzoli, Milan, 2013, p. 161, no. 152, ill. on p. 206 (curated by Francesca Pola)

“The work of art will be all the more meaningful the more it is available, in its settling and becoming ordered research, to stand as accumulation of uncertainty.”
(Agostino Bonalumi)

Bonalumi‘s work is a long path that meanders through fifty years of continuous experimentation, cohesion with the artist‘s expressive choices, and total adhesion to objectivity. His canvases are objectual-paintings whose purpose is to overcome the limitations of the frame and occupy the surrounding space: these are three-dimensional bodies that break the surface of the canvas to invade the third dimension.
„The object of art today, therefore, is to create neither „thing“ nor „fetish“– it must instead retain aesthetic autonomy which alone justifies its survival. Further, the artistic object will be able to rise to a higher rank: to become an integral element – indeed, a determining factor – of the environment. Thus we will have the ambient object; which will not only be already an architectural fact, but a plastic-colour-environmental fact– an extension and expansion of usual painting and sculpture.“
(Gillo Dorfles, in Agostino Bonalumi, Fabrizio Bonalumi and Alberto Fiz, exh.-cat., Museo Marca, Catanzaro, 22 February - 31 May 2014)

Pittura Oggetto
video and article on the Milanese art scene of the 1960s from the myART MAGAZINE