Bonalumi. Sculptures

Through a selection of the most significant sculptural works of Augustine Bonalumi, the monographic exhibition Bonalumi. Sculptures, by Francesca Pola and realized with the collaboration of the Archives of Milan and the Bonalumi Mazzoleni Galleria d'Arte di Torino, specifically intended to represent the artist's career, analyzed from a perspective dedicated and parallel to that of his "painting-object."
Designed for spaces of Mazzoleni Art Gallery of Turin, the exhibition - which opens on October 30 - is designed with a focus characteristic of the interest Bonalumi for experimenting with different materials and designed in a chronological development together and typological. The halls will house the sculptures Bonalumi in dialogue with a selection of works on the wall: the first examples in plastic canvas, you will go to large fiberglass sculptures including two of his masterpieces, Black (1969) and Red (2005), continuing through the the most unique experiences of the artist, such as sculptures made from fiber glass and crystal in the examples of Relationships (1968) or Yellow (1994), to close with the experiments in bronze and ceramics in his reflection on the exploration plastic.
The realization of sculptures by Agostino Bonalumi starts in the middle of the sixties: the first works are modeled objects through the use of the canvas, using the same operating mode of the canvases estroflesse recognized by critics as his contemporary object-paintings. The fourth dimension comes to occupy a specific space as a typical feature of the sculpture, including through the use of color as a crucial element to give a role to the spatial form of the sculpture itself.
In the seventies, the sculptures are freed from the pedestal for greater harmony with the surrounding environment and is in harmony with the experiments on materials that the artist was doing work in parallel on the wall in the technique of everted ciré, both with the spatial experience Bonalumi in research that involves more typically "environmental". Parallel to this research, the artist develops a particular discourse on lightness and transparency: thus the works in fiberglass and glass in which the investigation object is always related more with the space-time dimension. This delicate approach to the subject will be taken around to the nineties, when the artist will test the use of metal for wall works by exploiting the potential of the material to make slight movements and geometric undulations, as White (1989) and Blue (1990).
Just in recent years Bonalumi develops new polyhedral shapes, visible from different perspectives, which invite the viewer to take an active intervention, a movement around the work that will help them understand the overall result of these plastic forms continually discovering unexpected points of view. At the end of the nineties and the early twenty-first century, the artist returns to study the patterns and shapes created in the sixties and seventies, through the use of colored ceramics, such as Blue and Red (2010), noted the importance of and reflection of light that shapes and molds
the entire sculpture or bronze casting, as noble reinterpretation of experimental sculptures made ??with new materials and cutting-edge in the seventies, Bronze (2006) and bronze (2007).
On the occasion of the exhibition will be published in a monograph titled "BONALUMI. SCULPTURES ", curated by Francesca Pola with the collaboration of the Archives of Milan and the Bonalumi Mazzoleni Art Gallery of Turin, published by Numerozeroeditore, in Italian and English, which aims to study and contextualize the experience of sculptural Augustine is Bonalumi within his personal and creative, both within the larger season Italian and international art.

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