The Geometric Perfection of Harmony...Fausto Melotti at Hauser & Wirth
Beginning 20 April 2016, Hauser & Wirth presents ‘Fausto Melotti’, the gallery’s debut exhibition of works by the late Italian sculptor, installation artist, and poet, admired for his unique contribution to the development of mid-century European Modernism. In a compact survey spanning six decades and highlighting the remarkable breadth of Melotti’s career, the exhibition traces an artistic journey between the realms of abstraction and figuration. 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.
On view through 18 June, ‘Fausto Melotti’ features drawings, ceramics, and sculptures from the early 1930s through the mid-1980s, including the artist’s plaster bas-reliefs, fantastical terracotta ‘Teatrini’ (Little Theaters), and signature lithe brass sculptures. The exhibition is curated by Douglas Fogle, former Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and is accompanied by a new publication featuring historical material from the archive of Fondazione Fausto Melotti.
A pioneer of Italian art, Fausto Melotti (1901 – 1986) 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 gradually shifted his focus to abstraction and a new non-objective art. Active in the artist milieu of prewar Milan, Melotti developed influential friendships with the Rationalist architects of Gruppo 7 and the abstract artists who gravitated around Galleria del Milione. With Fontana, he joined the ‘Abstraction- Creation’ movement, developing firm ideas about non-figurative art. In 1935, he wrote, ‘Greek architecture, Piero della Francesca’s paintings, Bach’s music, rationalist architecture – these are all ‘exact’ arts.’
The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth opens on the gallery’s first floor with an intimate presentation of abstract sculptures and bas-reliefs, exemplary of the artist’s first forays in abstraction. Reflecting the influence of his formative studies in music, mathematics, and engineering, these early works invoke the geometric purity in Melotti’s pursuit of ‘harmony’ and ‘counterpoint.’ Rendered in bronze, the rhythmic spiral of ‘Scultura n. 11’ (Sculpture No. 11) (1934) materializes harmonic melodies, while ‘Scultura n. 12’ (Sculpture No. 12) (1934 [1968]) invokes the artist’s investigations of reductive, planar architectural structures. These nuanced, rational forms of the 1930s reverberate in – and maintain a poetic continuity with – the works of Melotti’s postwar career.
Fausto Melotti, Curated by Douglas Fogle Hauser & Wirth New York, 32 East 69th Street 20 April - 18 June 2016 Opening Wednesday 20 April, 6-8pm
