Studio f. 22 Modern Art Gallery;

Palazzolo sull’Oglio, Brescia (label on the reverse);

European Private Collection.

"I no longer saw the canvas as a place of representation, but as more of a means unto itself for creating the work: there was an interest in materials rather than in a particular subject matter.”–Agostino Bonalumi quoted in Bonalumi. All the Shapes of Space 1958–1976, exh. cat. Robilant+Voena, London, 2013, p. 189

A leading figure in the Milanese artistic vanguard of in the 1960s, Agostino Bonalumi was associated with the new generation of artists who sought to jettison art's primary function as a realm of personal and existential expression in favour of probing its structural and material realities. Executed in 1973, Bonalumi's monochromatic Rosso highlights the critical attention the artist paid in his practice to process and materiality, the defining elements of minimalist and conceptual art. Inspired in part by his friendship with Lucio Fontana, Bonalumi privileged the investigation of the physical and spatial presence of the work of art, leading him to evolve what came to be described as "picture-objects". Such works, including the present Rosso, project into the real space of the viewer, reaching beyond the illusory confines of the flat canvas, no longer simply a surface destined to be marked. This three-dimensional structure possesses a unique vitality, protruding and receding rhythmically into space in order to confront the pre-determined limits of existing artistic media, and thus create a truly futuristic work of art.

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