Pietro Consagra

Consagra's gate at Gibellina, Sicily

Pietro Consagra was born on the 4th of October 1920 in Mazara del Vallo, Sicily. Son of Luigi and Maria Lentini, Consagra was one of Italy’s most prominent Post-War abstract sculptors: he surpassed the three-dimensionality of the media, encouraging the spectators to have a more immediate approach with the artwork as it was presented as a flatter surface.

Education

Consagra, at first, joined the military – aiming to reach the role of captain. Nevertheless, his innate talent for drawing led him to attend evening art classes and to join a carpentry studio, where he first started to work with clay. Eventually, he moved to Palermo where he undertook Fine Art studies in 1938 at the Accademia di Belle Arti and successfully graduated in 1944.

Work

In the same year as his graduation, his need to be closer to art and to feel in “the beating heart of creativity” led him to move to Rome where he shared a studio with the artist Renato Guttuso. His visit to Paris in the winter of 1946 introduced him to the ateliers of Brancusi, Giacometti, Laurens, Hartung, Adam – who kept many of Picasso’s chalk works – and Pevsner’s home. Such exposure to a great range of artworks and different styles furtherly cemented Consagra’s desire to create something new.

The Group Forma I (Form I)

In 1947, Consagra co-founded the art group Forma I (Form I), with the artists Pietro Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Giulio Turcato, Antonio Sanfilippo, Carla Accardi, and Ugo Attardi. They proposed a structured, socially-oriented, nonfigurative aesthetic – mediating between abstraction and realism. Between 1947 and 1950, the group published a journal on contemporary aesthetic called “Forma”, in which the self-proclaimed “formalists and Marxists” artists openly rejected Picasso’s artistic “deformation”. The group held their first show called “Arte Giovane Italiana” (“Young Italian Art”) at the National Gallery of Prague, organised by the Fronte Nazionale per la Gioventù (Italian Front for the Youth) in 1947. In the following year, the group organised the first non-figurative, abstract art exhibition in post-war Rome, called “Mostra del Gruppo Forma I” (Exhibition of the group Form I) at the Art Club. Later, in the bulletin of the Art Club, Consagra was acclaimed as the only one who, among his colleagues, reached an integrally abstract expression. In 1949 Consagra exhibited at the “Mostra di Scultura Contemporanea” in the gardens of Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (Peggy Guggenheim Foundation) in Venice, where Peggy Guggenheim made her first acquisition of one of Consagra’s artworks for her collection. Henceforth, Consagra exhibited in the Biannale of Venice eleven more times between 1950 and 1993, where he won the sculpture prize at the exhibition in 1960.

Solo Work

In 1952, while being part of the group, Consagra wrote an essay titled “Necessità della Scultura”, (“The Necessity of Sculpture”) in which he defended the practice from the accusations of it being a ‘dead’ art expressed in “La Scultura Lingua Morta” (1945) by Arturo Martini. Consagra felt the need to free the sculpture of its three-dimensional quality, which, according to him, implied an authoritarian approach to the practice. The forced historically-ridden legacy of sculpture pushed Consagra to find a new concept that would allow a more instantaneous communication with the spectator. As he followed that line of thoughts, Consagra started meditating on the different dimensions sculpture can have.

It’s with his series “Colloqui” (“Colloquy”) that Consagra finally introduced the sculptures with a single point of view; starting from 1952, the artist exhibited them at the 1954 and 1956 Venice Biennales – their newly found, and almost provoking, abstraction created a new relationship with the spectator. Larger commissions and the consistent gathering of an international audience, motivated Consagra to seek exposure outside the borders of Italy; he took part of the 1955 Biennale of São Paulo, where he was awarded with the Price “Metalurgica Matarazzo”. In the 1960s Consagra was associated with the group Continuità (1961 – ca. 1970), which saw some members from Forma I: Carla Accardi, Piero Dorazio, and Gastone Novelli – the artists stirred a stronger sense of closeness with Italian art history, referencing its past order and structure.

Throughout his life, he was given several solo exhibitions, such as at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1958), Galerie de France, Paris (1959); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, and in Rotterdam, Netherlands (1967). In August of the same year, Consagra moved to the United States and taught for a year at the School of Arts in Minneapolis; he later was invited to partake to the exhibition “Sculpture from Twenty Countries” at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York. Later in October, Consagra had a solo exhibition in New York, in which he presented the “Ferri Trasparenti”, “Colloquio col Vento” (“Colloquy with the Wind, 1962), “Giardini”, and the “Piani Appesi”, which featured rotating flat sculptures that followed a spiral, which introduced the concept of ‘bifrontality’ and the experience of the artwork from ‘inwards’ to ‘outwards’ – in the words of the artist: “[…]With the spiral I move from the inside towards the outside, and from the outside I seek to return inside again: to me this is like breathing”.

His experimentations with flat surfaces evolved into the creation of the new “Sottilissime” (“Extremely Thins”) in 1968. As the title implies, these artworks feature the minimum possible thickness: two tenth of a millimetre. Furthermore, Consagra challenged his own vision by creating the “Sottilissime Impossibili” (“Impossible Extremely Thins”), which, at less of a tenth of a millimetre shouldn’t stand without bending. At the same time, Consagra reached the opposite concept of his Sottilissime and created the “Edifici Frontali” (“Frontal Buildings”) which were as thick as six meters and deceiving the viewer in not giving a correct and immediate angle to look at them.

His interest in underlining aspects of frontality led the artist to creating sculptures that could not be seen in their entirety: in the 1972 Venice Biennale, the “Aspects of Italian Sculpture” Consagra placed three arched sculptures, intentionally anchored to one another, which prevented the viewer from being able to see each sculpture in its entirety as they had to pass underneath them. The artist, driven by the idea of creating monument-like artworks, returned to Sicily – his native land – and created the “Stella” in the town of Gibellina; the twenty-eight meters high steel sculpture served the purpose of creating an open-air museum in the newly built city, that, in 1968, had been destroyed by an earthquake. Furthermore, the artist contributed to the town’s entrance, designed the gates, the building named "Meeting", and the gates to the cemetery, where he was later buried.

In 1989 the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome opened a major retrospective of Consagra’s work. Two years later the artist held two solo exhibitions: “Consagra Colore” at Palazzo Steri in Palermo, and “Porte del Cremlino” in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. The artist installed the large “Porta” at the entrance of Palazzo di Brera in Milan, 1996. His last monumental work “Doppia Bifrontale” (“Double Bifrontal”), a four by six meters sculpture, was placed in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Pietro Consagra died in Milan in 2005, leaving as a legacy an extensive oeuvre spanning decades of his life. In 2017, the Italian Cultural Institute in London held the exhibition ‘Ties | Legami’, showing the collaborative work between Consagra and the photographer Ugo Mulas. The world renowned curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist introduced the exhibition and highlighted the importance of not forgetting and bringing Consagra to memory, by saying: “[...] exhibitions are so necessary for many reasons: because they can contribute to the protest against forgetting and, of course, this exhibition is incredibly important to bring back the immediate memory [of] Pietro Consagra and the visionary work he [had] been doing.”

References

• Biography of Pietro Consagra
• Introduction to "TIES I" by Hans Ulrich-Obrist
• Pietro Consagra on ARTUNER
• Agenzia Giornalista Italia report on Consagra's death
• The Artists.org article on Consagra
• New Orleans Museum of Art article

Notes

External links

• Pietro Consagra at Find a Grave