Private Collection

Pietro Consagra is one of Europe’s most renowned post-war sculptors. Born in 1920 in Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, he moved to Rome in 1944, the “open city”, that was beginning its civic and material reconstruction after World War II. The artist developed his highly distinctive vision for a new form of sculpture after a formative visit to Paris in 1946. This marked the beginning of an active dialogue with the international avant-gardes. He realized his first abstract sculptures that were not modelled as a whole, but instead built with overlapping planes dialoguing with each other.
The Colloqui (“Dialogues”), with which Consagra fully defined his frontal sculpture in 1952, can be considered as some of the most emblematic alternatives offered by European sculpture to the unbridled impetus and material deconstruction of Informal Art. They consisted of two (and later, sometimes even three) vertical elements placed in such a way as to form a dynamic contrast with each other, within a perimeter that tended to be square or rectangular. The Colloqui are realized in a series of different materials, but their planes are always reduced to their minimum thickness, placed together or superimposed, forming layers and surfaces that alternate overhangs, openings, interstices, patinas and colours.

After experimenting with various materials and thicknesses for his sculptures, Consagra felt the need to increase the volume of his bi-frontal sculptures, thus from 1972 he started to work with marble. The preciousness of the material, associated with the de-materialization given by the bi-frontality of the sculpture, represented a challenge for Consagra that he was more than able to fulfil. Realised in 1991, Verde Assoluto is an outstanding example of Consagra’s Marmi.

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