“a celebration of the work of Emilio Scanavino and his decisive creative decades of the 1950s through to the 1980s”

This period saw his affirmation as one of the pioneers and protagonists of an innovative poetics of the ‘sign’, situating his practice between the Informel and Spazialismo movements and a new concept of the void.

Scanavino’s revolutionary work first developed in the years immediately following World War II. In a direct dialogue with an international and vibrant artistic context, his contemporaries included Sebastian Matta and Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland, and artists of the CoBrA movement (Asger Jorn, Karel Appel and Corneille in particular). It was the time when Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri were developing their radical experimentations with space and matter, overcoming the traditional notions of painting and sculpture into a new direct relationship with the world. Fontana himself was a very close friend of the artist, as is testified by Scanavino’s Necrologio per Fontana (An Obituary for Fontana), 1968, created on the occasion of his death and included in the exhibition.