White Garden, 1966, painted iron, cut, curved, welded and painted plates, 46 7/16 × 61 13/16 × 2 3/8 in.
©Foto Massimo Listri
Pietro Consagra (Mazara del Vallo 1920 – Milan 2005)
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo. In 1944 he moved to Rome and in 1947 co-founded the Forma group. Two years later he exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, which bought one of his works. In this period he embraced a frontal, synchronic vision of sculpture, establishing a philosophy of the surface built on thin juxtaposed or superimposed planes, predisposed to spiritual dialogue. The bronzes presented at the Venice Biennale in 1954, 1956 and 1960, the year in which he received the sculpture prize, are therefore called Colloqui (Conversations) and brought him recognition on the international scene. In 1962 he exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York, and in 1959 and in 1964 he took part in Documenta in Kassel. He responded to the rise of pop art with more sensual, enameled, colorful two-sided works, which were presented at the 1965 Rome Quadriennale, as well as at the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam, at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1967. In 1968 he created La città frontale (The Frontal City) and shortly afterwards began to intensify his usage of marble. In 1972 and 1982 he exhibited again at the Venice Biennale. Then he produced Stella (Star) and Meeting in Gibellina. In 1989 GNAM dedicated a retrospective to him, followed by a solo exhibition in 1991 at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and in 1996 at Palazzo di Brera in Milan, where he installed his large Porta (Door). He placed Giano (Janus) in Rome, in Largo di Santa Susanna, in 1997, and Doppia bifrontale (Double Bifrontal) in Strasbourg, in front of the European Parliament, in 2003.
The fascination of the sculptures titled Gardens by Consagra is even greater if they are conceptually linked to his Suspended Planes and Transparent Irons, which he began in 1964: taken together, they come to constitute a kind of artificial landscape, embodying a sculptural emotion of living, a fantasy realized. All these works, painted pink, blue, lilac or turquoise, were made in a key period of the artist’s career, when he seemed able to reinvent sculpture in a new empathetic relationship with society. Consagra, who had by then explored every aspect of heavy metals, chose at this stage to use color as the essential body of the sculpture, thus relieving the work of all ideological tension. In his White Garden, produced in two unique pieces, a sudden updraft seems to propel the fragments of the sheets, thinning them, curving them and composing them into a single image. In an alternation of gravity and levitation, the sheets undulate and converge, evoking a cocoon opening up. Using automobile paint, this White Garden, along with the Orange, Carmine, Purple and Black Gardens, suggests that sculpture can also convey the freedom of appearing sensitively fragile and mutable. (Renata Cristina Mazzantini)