(Città di Castello 1926–2008)
Untitled (Cucito a macchina), 1959, signed and inscribed 1959/Roma on the reverse, painted and sewn canvas, 75 x 97.5 cm, framed

The work is registered in the Associazione Archivio Nuvolo, Città di Castello and will be included in the catalogue raisonné of Nuvolos works currently being prepared.

Provenance:
G. Morra Collection, Naples
Acquired from the above by the father of the present owner (c. 1980s)

Literature:
B. Corà, Nuvolo. La pittura e l’atelier di grafica - dal 1952 ad oggi, Petruzzi ed., January 1993, p.160, 2 with ill.
G. Celant (ed.), Nuvolo and Post-War Materiality 1950–1965, catalogue of the exhibition held at Galleria Di Donna, New York, 27 October 2017 – 26 January 2018, pp. 159 and 268, no. 251 with ill.

An experimentalist and visionary, from an early age Nuvolo began to cultivate a love of artisanal activities. Born in Umbria to a family of typographers, during the Second World War he took part in the Resistance movement and his unpredictability and ability to disappear into the Umbrian hills earned him the nickname “Nuvolo” (cloud), which would stay with him for his whole life.
At the age of 23 he moved to Rome on the advice of his friend Alberto Burri.
The capital was, at that time, a bubbling artistic and cultural centre, a veritable crucible of ideas and talent and the studio in Via Margutta, where Nuvolo collaborated with Burri, was its epicentre.
In those years Rome was culturally closer to New York than ever before. It was a game of assimilation and conquest. The Italian galleries exhibited American artists, while American museums and institutions were attracted by aesthetic developments in Italy.
These were the years in which artists such as Afro, Capogrossi, Scialoja, Prampolini, Dorazio, Accardi, Turcato and Rotella were working in Rome, as well as important figures of American art, including Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Salvatore Scarpitta and Conrad Marca-Relli. Nuvolo thus found himself catapulted into the midst of a scintillating artistic revolution in the aftermath of the Second World War, led by a desire for a break with tradition and social renewal.

During the Fifties and Sixties, Nuvolo exhibited in the best Roman galleries, in Florence, in the United States (Peggy Guggenheim bought several pieces for her collections in Boston and New York) and in Milan, where he was in contact with Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana.
After participating in 1954 in the “Mostra nazionale arte non-oggettiva” (‘national exhibition of non-objective art’) at the Numero Gallery alongside Accardi, Capogrossi, Nigro, Vedova and others, in 1955 Emilio Villa, experimentalist, philologist of ancient languages, artist and inspiration for artists, presented Nuvolo’s first solo exhibition with screen-prints and the Serotipie at the Carrozze Gallery in Rome.
Nuvolo honed and experimented with the technique of screen-printing, adopting an artisanal system: he ground pigments and mixed them with resins and nitro solvents in order to make inks to which he could add oil- or tempera-based colours. The effect was one of layering. Compared to Fontana’s holes or Kline’s strokes, the approach taken by Nuvolo in his Serotipie was directed towards an intentionality and control (regardless of the final result) which, from that moment on, would always accompany his experiments. Little by little, the artist would move away from primitivism in his painting and would, increasingly, “cool” his technique, limiting the spontaneity of the gesture and attempting to “depersonalise” the technical operation. From here, the Scacchi would take shape (almost contemporaneous with the Serotipie) and, later, the Bianchi (1957-58). From 1958 he started creating his first unstructured works, making use of a sewing machine. These creations, referred to as Cuciti a macchina (‘machine sewn’), are made from scraps of his own clothes or other fabrics which are stretched onto the canvas or joined in a sort of collage, just like the 1959 work presented here. This piece is made even more special due to the application on the reverse of printed sheets with writing and poems by Emilio Villa, a friend from a life lived between passion and poverty in the Rome of the 1950s and 1960s.

Referring to this series of works, Celant writes:
[...] Moving towards a reduction to zero of marks and traces serves to eliminate the mystique behind the personal handling of the chromatic material and to insert the self-affirmation of the support which is the canvas, the cloth or the unworked paper. It is to be understood not as a vector of other signs, but as the sign in itself, autonomous and therefore self-referential. In 1957, after several experiments with collage using painted paper on canvas, Nuvolo switched to directly stitching portions of cloth in soft colours – from white to cream to brown – in works which, in 1958, caught the attention of Peggy Guggenheim. If viewed in parallel and in competition with Burri, the adoption of the textile as artistic medium by Nuvolo separates itself from him due to the transparency and lightness of the material, which points to the importance of the “cutting” and “stitching”.