VENICE 1919 – VENICE 2006
Emilio Vedova was born in 1919 to a working-class family in Venice, where he learned to paint as a self-taught artist
In 1942 he joined the antinovecentist movement “Corrente” In 1944-45 he participated in the Resistance and the following year signed the Manifesto of Realism (Beyond Guernica) in Milan and was in Venice among the founders of the “New Italian Secession,” later the “New Front of the Arts”
In the 1950s he began participating in a series of international group exhibitions; for a very short time he joined Lionello Venturi’s Group of Eight He creates textural collages and assemblages and works in the informal sphere with intense gestures on the chromatic scale of whites and blacks, with the inclusion of reds He creates the Cycle of Protest and the Cycle of Nature…
In 1954 he participated in the II São Paulo Biennial in Brazil and was awarded a prize that allowed him to spend three months in Brazil Here he is strongly impressed by the reality of the interior areas of South America and the Carnival of Rio In 1958 he began intense lithographic work and was awarded the Lissone Prize The following year he exhibited his first Scontro di situazioni, a cycle with canvases arranged at an angle, as part of the Vitalità nell’arte exhibition, held in the Venetian Palazzo Grassi and curated by Carlo Scarpa
From the early 1960s he worked on Plurimi, polymateric realizations widely articulated in space and extensible, shown in an initial exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in Rome and presented by Giulio Carlo Argan From late 1963 to mid-1965 he was in Berlin, a guest of the Senate for Arts and Sciences, DAAD, and in his large atelier at the Grünewald he produced the series of the large Berlin Plurimi 1963-65, seven of which, the “Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch ’64,” were to be exhibited at Documenta III – Kassel 1964, with resounding international resonance
Constantly turning to innovation in research, he created glass plates in collaboration with Venini’s Murano furnace, Spazio-plurimo-luce, worked on the cycles of Lacerations and Fragments, made Disks and Circles, also collaborated with Luigi Nono on the sets for Intolerance ’60 and Prometheus
His last notable solo exhibitions included the major anthological exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli in 1998 and, after his death in 2006, at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome and the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin
He died in Venice at the age of 87, just over a month after the death of his wife Annabianca
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