48 - Emilio Vedova (1919–2006)

Emilio Vedova (1919–2006) Non dove (round), 1987 Oil on panel 111.1 x 111.1 x 3.5 cm Signature: “Emilio Vedova” on the reverse Date: “1987” on the reverse Other inscriptions: “Non dove (round)”, “[diameter symbol] 111 c.m. painting on wood”, “base [arrow symbol]” on the reverse Provenance: Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation, Venice; Veneto Banca SpA in LCA Certificates: Certificate of Authenticity from the Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation, No. 327, dated September 2, 2009 Condition. Support: 90% (cracks in the panel) Condition. Surface: 90% (cracked and fissured varnish; slight damage from impact and abrasion; losses) For direct WhatsApp assistance before and during the live auction: +39 346 12 999 80 // Direct assistance via WhatsApp before and during the auction: +39 346 12 999 80 The work belongs to the series “Dischi, Circles, and Beyond,” created by Emilio Vedova between 1985 and 1987 and presented in the major exhibition “Vedova in tondo,” held at the Fondazione Vedova, at the Magazzino del Sale in Venice, from May 17 to November 12, 2014. Toward the end of 1984, the artist began an intense exploration of the circle: a complete and perfect form, capable of evoking the sacred, yet set in tension with the imagery of dynamic, opposing, and unstable forces that had until then characterized his artistic practice. Two essential principles—the primal and the complete—thus converge in his work, even aspiring to represent the balance of the universe. During these years, Vedova’s “pure” painting—understood as an explosion of emotional energy—engaged with the impulse of conceptual art, following the example of Joseph Beuys, who had succeeded in uniting chance and reason, high and low culture. One of his most famous circular paintings, “Non Dove ’86 I (23-1-86),” was painted immediately after Vedova learned of Beuys’s death, a date directly referenced in the title. The artist explores the circular form on both canvas and wood, either as a standalone shape or inscribed within a square. The work up for auction, a tondo on wood, is among the most successful examples of this period, in which Vedova experiments with the urge to break and tear down “boundaries” through, as he himself writes, “impulses of overflow—the incontinence of perimeters...”. The tondo is not, in fact, like the rectangle, an ordinary format in painting: it is a distinct, deliberate form that carries meaning. It is a meaning that encounters, contains, concentrates, and vitalizes the impulse. The theme had been foreshadowed by the large canvases of 1981–1984 and by his explorations in the “Compresenze” and “Di Umano” series, in which the artist had primarily investigated the realm of human emotions, a project concluded in 1983. For Vedova, however, the tondo also represented an engagement with a pivotal form in art history: from classical antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. A form that has left its mark on architecture—from the Pantheon to medieval rose windows—and which, in sculpture and painting, culminates in the tondi of Filippo Lippi, Andrea della Robbia, Michelangelo, and Parmigianino’s “Self-Portrait in the Mirror.”