Pino Pascali

Galleria Alexandre Iolas, Milan
Collection Loreti, Rome
Acquired by the present owner in 1991-92

Spoleto, Palazzo Ancaini, X Festival dei Due Mondi, Undici artisti italiani degli anni Sessanta, 1967
Milan, Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Pino Pascali, 1967
Paris, Galerie Alexandre Iolas, Pascali: Les sculptures blanches. Les éléments de la Nature, 1968
Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Pino Pascali, 1969
Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Quatres artistes Italiens plus que nature, 1969
Florence, 22° Fiorino d'Oro, Biennale Internazionale d'arte, Forte del Belvedere, Aspetti dell'arte fantastica oggi, 1975

Anna d'Elia, Pino Pascali, Rome-Bari 1983, p. 153, no. 83, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the illustration fails to convey the three dimensionality of the work. Condition: The seven elements are in very good condition. The three highest bamboos have light undulation to the canvas with a few related hairline cracks, as illustrated in the 1968 photograph of the Alexander Iolas exhibition in Paris which is reproduced in the catalogue, and a few isolated minor paint losses. In some few areas the artist has applied patches to the canvas, which are original. No restoration is evident under ultra-violet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Visually thought-provoking in both scale and format, Bambú executed in 1966, is an extremely rare and unique example of Pino Pascali's celebrated series of 'white sculptures' or finte sculture, which translated means fake sculpture.  The only work from the series based on the appearance of bamboo, this piece epitomizes the monumental and minimal white sculptures that playfully evoke child-like imaginings of animals and natural forms; a comparable example of which, Il Dinosauro Riposa (1966), belongs to the Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna e contemporanea in Rome.  Indeed, Bambú typically echoes the wit and humour particular to the artist's practise, as interpreted by Maurizio Cattelan, Pascali playfully approaches sculpture and channels an evocation of childlike games in his work. (Maurizio Cattelan, 'Doctor Stranglove' in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Gagosian Gallery,  Pino Pascali, 2006, p.10).  Fascinated by materials and the possibility of their transfiguration, Pascali transforms childish play and experimentation into high art.  Bambú drolly challenges the paradigmatic sculptural heritage of Italy via an engagement with banal materials and the fantastical, channelled through an affinity with the aims and aesthetic of 1960s Pop Art.  Fatally injured in a motorcycle accident in 1968, the untimely death of Pascali at the age of thirty-three, positions this work at the very apotheosis of Pascali's tragically truncated oeuvre.

 

Produced in 1966, this work emerged during a pivotal year for Pascali.  The rejection of his controversial Le Armi show from the Tartaruga Gallery in Rome and subsequent change of venue to the Gian Enzo Sperone Gallery in Turin presaged the debut of Pascali's finte sculture at his solo show in the L'Attico Gallery– the hub of the emerging art scene in Rome in the mid 1960s.  A body of work initiated in 1966, the finte sculture represent a movement away from the overtly political towards a heightened commitment to art informed by natural forms and the semiotic potential of elementary materials.   As such, these sculptures correspond to the unity of feeling among many contemporary Italian artists; a phenomenon defined a year later by Germano Celant as Arte Povera. 

 

The central impetus of scrutinising and stripping art back to its fundaments is evident in the aesthetic and structural ambiguity of Pascali's Bambú.  Sculpturally substantial and devoid of colour, the monochrome surface evokes the purity and solidity of alabaster or Carrara marble, and yet, the material construction of Bambú belies its appearance.  White canvas stretched over a column of lightweight wooden ribs, Bambú is indebted to the work of Lucio Fontana and Enrico Castellani, in negotiating between the two-dimensionality of the canvas-stretcher and the three-dimensionality of sculpture.  Moreover, a debt to the legacy of Alberto Burri and Piero Manzoni is evident in the conflation and experimentation with a diverse range of materials, natural and synthetic.  Belonging to the same generation of twentieth-century Italian artists confronted with a hugely intimidating art-historical past, Pascali's challenge to technique and tradition is evident in his resistance to classification:  "I pretend to make sculptures but so that they don't become the sculptures that they claim to be. I want them to become something light, to be what they are, which doesn't explain a thing." (Carla Lonza, Autoritratto, Milan, 1969, p. 355).  Instead of building sculptural monuments from the enduring properties of bronze or marble, Pascali's finte sculture assimilate an art-historical sense of the void within the hollow cavities contained by the perishable canvas structures.   By employing the craftsmanship acquired from studying theatre design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, Pascali thwarts art-historical tradition and deceives our visual sensibilities.  Nonetheless, aside from a formal scrutiny, Pascali invites a reading of the fantastical into his finte sculture.

 

Expertly made and indicative of Pascali's formal training, these columns of bamboo call to mind film and theatre props in their scale and lightweight construction.  The notion of escapism and the make-believe associated with the film and theatre industry is compounded by the subject matter of Pascali's finte sculture.   Many of the resulting forms abstractly suggest the shapes of animals, such as shark and whale fins, the curved body of a snake and even the spined-tail of a dragon; while others in the series call to mind the natural forms of waves, waterfalls, and in this case bamboo.  Describing a visit to Pascali's studio in 1966, Fabio Sargentini recounts: "I was flabbergasted.  It was a huge work-shop of white three-dimensional forms, giraffes, dinosaurs, rhinoceroses, hunting-trophies, tails of whales, and finally a sea of curved waves that spread across the floor.  The space looked like nothing so much as Noah's ark." (Fabio Sargenti, 'From September to September,' quoted in Robert Lumley, 'Spaces of Arte Povera', in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern, Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, 2001, pp. 47-8).  The make-believe forms derived from a playfully child-like imagination posit a joining of fictive landscape with the real space of the studio or gallery.  Belonging to this body of work, Bambú represents the potential of 'primitive' architectural forms to be transformed into something fantastical – a reading compounded by a more nuanced translation of finte sculture, which alongside 'fake' also evokes a reading of the fictional and make-believe.

 

Monochrome with precisely delineated silhouettes, the clean lines and uncomplicated forms share an affinity with the concise metonymic language of the comic book - a particularly American icon of Pop masterfully deployed in the work of Roy Lichtenstein.   The relationship between Arte Povera and Pop is one of simultaneous appreciation and rejection; this dichotomy is evident in Pascali's work through a tension between the mass-produced aesthetic of Pop and the craftsmanship and typically Italian concerns of Arte Povera.  According to Robert Lumley "Pascali – who has visited Rauschenberg's exhibitions in Rome, painted a pastiche of a Johns flag, and produced the erotic lips in the stretched canvas Omaggio a Billie Holliday [1964] – was deeply imbued with neo-Dada and Pop influences." (Robert Lumley, 'Spaces of Arte Povera', in Exhibition Catalogue, Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, Tate Modern, London, 2001, p. 47).  For Bambú, the particular influence of Claes Oldenburg's early soft-sculptures of mundane objects is evident in Pascali's challenge to sculptural tradition, alongside his choice of material and distortion of scale.  Nonetheless, Pascali himself outlined his own detachment from the American context of Pop: "our civilization, instead, is a civilization which on a technological level is behind with respect to the Americans so that a direct action between man and material is made." (Pino Pascali cited in: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiez, Arte Povera, London, 1999, p. 262).  Evidently in conversation with the wider aesthetic context of the Pop, Pascali is essentially rooted in his identity as an Italian artist engaged in the limits and signifying potential of elementary materials.

 

The emerging star of the Roman art-world in the mid 1960s, Pino Pascali's remarkable but short career marks the presentation of a monumental work for public sale as an incredibly rare occasion.  Produced at the pinnacle of this artist's tragically truncated oeuvre, never before reproduced, and appearing in public for the first time since 1975, the monumental Bambú embodies the success of 1966 for Pascali, while presciently intimating at a heightened immersion in the semiotic and physical potential of materials that would come to typify Pascali's production until his untimely death in 1968.