Luciano Fabro

Galleria Bonomo, Bari
Collection Angelo Baldassarre, Bari (acquired circa 1970)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Milan, Galleria De Nieubourg, Luciano Fabro, 1969
Tokyo, Metropolitan Art Gallery; Kyoto, Municipal Art Museum; Nagoya, Aichi Prefectural Art Gallery; Fukuoka, Prefectural Culture House, Between Man and Matter: 10th Tokyo Biennale, 1970, n.p., illustrated in installation
Bari, Galleria Bonomo, Barry, Bochner, Boetti, Buren, Darboven, Dibbets, Fabro, LeWitt, Paolini, Ryman, Weiner, 1971
Contemporanea Roma, 1973-74, p. 140, no. 6, illustrated (titled Penisola Italica)
Siena, Palazzo delle Papesse and Santa Maria della Scala, De Gustibus: Collezione Privata Italia, 2002, p. 109, illustrated in installation

Carla Lonzi, Luciano Fabro, Achille Bonito Oliva et al., Luciano Fabro: Lavori 1963-1986, Turin 1987, p. 73, illustrated in installation
Exhibition Catalogue, Turin, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d'arte contemporanea, Luciano Fabro, 1989, p. 60, no. 27, illustrated in installation

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality of the lead is richer and more varied, and the illustration fails to convey the transparency of the glass piece and the metallic finish of the lead. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. Close inspection reveals very shallow and minor irregularities to the surface of each lead piece near the outer ege, where the metal has faintly oxidised.
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“Italy is an image for anybody who feels in some way bound to it, whose shape is seen as a graphic of ideas.”

(the artist quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, Luciano Fabro, 1992, p. 109)

Nazione Italica hails from Fabro’s celebrated Italie series, which was begun in 1968 and revisited over the next decades in a variety of materials including bronze, fur, mirror, rubber elastic, and ribbon, among others. The Italie are considered one of the most iconic symbols of the Arte Povera movement. Executed in 1968 using lead overlaid with glass, the present lot is among the earliest Italie ever created by Fabro and was featured in his solo exhibition at the Galleria de Nieubourg, Milan, in 1969. Having remained in a single Italian collection since the 1970s, this rarely-seen Italia demonstrates the strength and importance of Fabro’s inceptive work within a career-defining theme. The first Italia to appear at auction since 2006, Nazione Italica presents a rare moment to collect this superlative series.

Composed of three individual parts - the peninsula, Sardinia, and Sicily - Nazione Italica is nevertheless displayed as a single whole, the two islands resting within the continent proper. An act of geographical appropriation, the title of the work equally gestures towards the nationalistic idea of a unified Italy. Several of Fabro's Italie omit Sardinia and Sicily entirely, however many notable examples with all three pieces exist, including the Italia d'Oro (Golden Italy) (1968) in the collection of the Haus der Kunst, Munich, which has the islands affixed on the back of the hanging peninsula, and Italia all’asta (Italy on a Stick) (1994) on long-term loan to the collection of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea,Turin, which stacks them one upon the other within the peninsula. Maximising the iconographic potency of the work, in these cases Fabro simplified the silhouette of his sculpture into the immediately recognisable 'boot', drawing visually peripheral regions into the heart of the nation.

Debuting against a backdrop of national political upheaval, and specifically amidst the violent student protests of 1968-9, the Italie were instantly interpreted as carrying a political message. Street posters promoting the Galleria de Nieubourg exhibition, emblazoned with Italia d’Oro – a shape of Italy cast in gold and hung upside-down from its “toe” – were immediately censored and removed. Fabro never intended an activist stance, but the collective of powerful, inherently divergeant, associations with Italy’s iconic shape appealed to him as rich subject matter. He has said: “Italy is an image for anybody who feels in some way bound to it, whose shape is seen as a graphic of ideas” (the artist quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, Luciano Fabro, 1992, p. 109). Specifically, Fabro experimented with the difference between an icon – an immediately recognisable symbol – and its varying physical manifestations across time and place. He explained: “[f]orm is contemporaneous, it is of the same time as its creator. Iconography comes from behind, it is the impulse which drives the creator and is the impulse which the creator hurls back” (Ibid.). The Italie thus exhibit, across their span, the interpretive flexibility that can be evinced from a single iconic sign – Italy.

Demonstrating the power of artists to challenge the monumentality of signs – and thus embedded ideas – through their craftsmanlike manipulation of physical materials, Fabro appropriated the shape of Italy to the very personal use of documenting new thoughts and inspirations. Its established meaning and historical force acted to anchor the piece, providing a backdrop against which his own exploration might be evident: “I need to understand how my hands work on something which remainds static. The form of Italy is static, immobile, I measure the mobility of my hands on something still. The Italies are like an album of sketches, a memo, I continue to make it over the years: if I study something new I sketch it in an Italy” (the artist quoted in: Ibid., p. 109). In many ways, Nazione Italica recalls Jasper John’s infamous Map of 1962, equally an investigation into national identity wrought in sculptural grey, evading the patriotic red, white, and blue for a broader investigation of the country’s shape as icon.Yet the stated importance of grappling manually with a work set Fabro apart from many of his American and European contemporaries, whose allegiance to conceptual or minimal art involved replacing the object’s value with the value of an idea. Fabro, in keeping with many Arte Povera artists, instead acknowledged the meanings that various materials and forms – both natural and cultural – could ground within a work of art.  

Wrought from lead and crystal, Nazione Italica evinces a playfulness with material utterly characteristic of Fabro’s approach. Clear glass contrasts solid, grey lead, the latter unexpectedly curled inward at the edges like parchment or dried leaf, and in emulation of rocky coastline. Ostensibly lending the work opposing qualities, the lead and crystal actually emerge from a common substance, the latter being merely geologic deposits and metals heated to turn brilliant and transparent. This choice might suggest the unity of Italian consciousness despite apparent differences, or the marriage of raw industrial materials with more classically refined worksmanship. Advancing an elemental reading that encompasses the entire series, Frances Morris, now Head of Collections at Tate Modern, has written that: “[c]ollectively the Italia works draw attention to the rootedness of our lives, to the land we inhabit. All our experiences and those of people in history, our culture, our architecture, arise from an encounter between ourselves and the land” (Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate, Luciano Fabro, 1997, p. 15).

Responding to the diversity of Fabro’s artistic oeuvre, which encompasses the giant vertical Piedi, large-scale marble sculpture, and the present Italie,  Margit Rowell has commented that: “the sole conceptual thread that consistently underlies Fabro’s art from the 1960s to the present is that his art is drawn from the richly diversified fabric of experience: his own, on a day-to-day basis, and that of his imagination in relation to a general historical or cultural context” (Margit Rowell, ‘Luciano Fabro’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, Fabro, 1992, p. 16). Perfectly embodying this summation, the Italie demonstrate how Fabro weaves webs of associations around the essential ‘template’ of Italy’s geography. Within this group, amongst the later Italia d’oro (Golden Italy) (1971), Italia del dolore (Italy of Pain) (1975), or Italia feticcio (Fetish Italy) (1981), Nazione Italica stands apart from what Fabro described as the “cheerful” – or perhaps ‘narrative’ – titles that Fabro came to employ (the artist quoted in: Exhibition Catalogue, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, Luciano Fabro, 1992, p. 110). An almost prototypical piece, Nazione Italica’s title reveals its intent to be more encompassing, evincing not a momentary national mood or subculture, but a grand vision.