Lot 15 D

The Italian painter and conceptual artist Pier Paolo Calzolari is one of the most important protagonists of contemporary Italian art. In the 1960s, he was one of the founders and leading exponent of Arte Povera, took part in pioneering exhibitions such as “When attitudes become form” in Basel in 1969, and was represented many times at the Venice Biennale and documenta. Over the decades, a rich oeuvre has emerged that also includes painting and performance art.
In his installations in particular, he generates a unique pictorial language. Calzolari uses recurring materials that he charges with a special semantic content, including salt, tobacco leaves, lead, copper, traces of fire, and ice. The artist spent his childhood in Venice; the extraordinary light prevailing there and its reflection on the white stone façades possess an enduring fascination for Calzolari which he often translates into his installations. He uses salt crusts precisely to create this intense, slightly structured white as the ground surface, and works organic and inorganic materials into the crust or mounts them onto it. In doing so, he also integrates everyday found objects such as coins, buttons or pieces of wire. The resulting works hover on the border between panel painting, assemblage and object. By means of his personal alchemy, the artist subtly thematises light and shadow, symbols of transience and transition as well as the ambivalent properties of materials - represented in the present offered work by the dominant element of an Asian fan made of goose feathers, seeming both fragile and archaic.