Lot 512 D

Turi Simeti, alongside his contemporaries Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi, is one of the most important members of the Italian ZERO movement. Born in Sicilian Alcamo in 1929, Simeti moved to Rome in 1958 and met Alberto Burri, whose informal material pictures probably triggered the first ideas of a completely new direction in the aspiring artist. The move to Madrid in 1965, the encounter with the old master Lucio Fontana and involvement in the legendary exhibition “ZERO Avantgarde” in Fontana's studio in the same year, establish Simeti as a serious member of the meanwhile international ZERO movement.
Monochrome canvases covering one or more sloping, relief-like oblique, predominantly oval discs are one of his trademarks. He names these depending on how many secretive elevations are hidden under the canvas and which tone of colour he chooses: “un ovale nero” or “due ovali bianchi”, etc. The unique, three-dimensional effect is ultimately provided by the light reflected from a mirror: It meets the slightly protruding, relief-like oval on the canvas hanging on the wall and opens up a gently interplay between light and shade. To achieve this effect, Simeti worked from the outset with complex substructures which the canvas would hide when stretched across. To this day, Simeti's work has remained consistent and has exhibited only minor changes such as the use of more modern textiles. The balancing of a three-dimensional intervention in the light surface and the nuances of the unique monochrome colouring have remained constant. The “ovali”, like Castellani's “Superficie”, Piero Manzoni's “Achrome”, or Lucio Fontana's “Concetto spaziale”, are classics of the Italian ZERO movement.