Pier Paolo Calzolari Untitled 2017 Feathers,... Lot 15

Pier Paolo Calzolari Untitled 2017 Feathers, wood and wire mounted in front of salt, wax, tobacco leaves, metal elements and threads on cardboard on wood 123 x 58 x 20 cm. Under plexiglass hood. The present work is included in the archive of the Fondazione Calzolari, Fossombrone. With enclosed monogrammed photographic certificate from the artist dated 2017. Provenance Directly from the artist; private collection, Milan 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 decisive representatives of Arte Povera; he took part in pioneering exhibitions such as "When attitudes become form" in Basel in 1969 and was represented several times at the Venice Biennale and the documenta. Over the decades, he created a rich oeuvre that also included painting and performance. In his installations in particular, he develops a unique visual language. Here Calzolari uses recurring materials that he charges with a special meaning, including salt, tobacco leaves, lead, copper, traces of fire, and ice. The artist spent his childhood in Venice, where the extraordinary light and its reflections on the white stone facades have a lasting fascination for him, which he often translates into his installations. He uses salt crusts to create precisely this intense, slightly structured white as a base surface, and works organic and inorganic materials into the crust or mounts them in front of it. In doing so, he also integrates everyday found objects, such as coins, buttons or pieces of wire. The resulting works move on the borderline between panel painting, assemblage and object. By means of his personal alchemy, the artist subtly thematizes light and shadow, signs of transience and transition, and the ambivalent properties of materials - represented in the work offered here by the dominant element of an Asian fan made of goose feathers that seems both fragile and archaic.