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Pietro
Consagra/Works and
biography
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Mythical
Conversation
1959 |
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Pietro Consagra was born in Mazara del Vallo, Sicily,
October 4, 1920. He attended the Accademia di Belle
Arti in Palermo from 1938 to 1944, the year he moved
to Rome. He first traveled to Paris in 1946 after participating
in his first group exhibition in Rome at the Galleria
del Cortile. In 1947 he was a founding member of the
Forma I group, which supported a socially oriented nonfigurative
aesthetic. Forma I held the first show of nonfigurative
art in postwar Rome, Mostra del Gruppo Forma I, at the
Art Club, and published a journal on contemporary aesthetics
entitled Forma I. Consagra’s first one-man show
took place in 1947 at the Galleria Mola, Rome. In 1949
he contributed work to the exhibition Mostra di scultura
contemporanea at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in
Venice.
Consagra was given one-man exhibitions at the Palais
des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in1958, at the Galerie de
France, Paris, in 1959, the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen,
Rotterdam, in 1967, and at the Marlborough Gallery,
Rome, in 1974. The artist received a prize at the São
Paulo Bienal in 1955, and participated frequently in
the Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Einaudi
Prize in 1956 and a Grand Prize for Sculpture in 1960.
In 1962 he was given his first one-man show in New York
at Staempfli Gallery, and participated in the exhibition
I Grandi Premi della Biennale 1948-1960 at Galleria
Ca’Pesaro, Venice. In 1964 he executed a fountain
in Mazara del Vallo.
Consagra has written at length on his art: his polemical
pamphlet of 1952, La necessità della scultura,
which was an important refutation of Arturo Martini’s
La scultura lingua morta, was followed by L’agguato
c’è (1961), and La città frontale
(1969). A major retrospective of his work was held at
the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, in
1989, where a permanent installation of his works was
opened in 1993. In 1991, he became the first abstract
sculptor to exhibit at the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
The Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart, Stoccarda, opened a
permanent installation of his paintings and sculptures
in 2002. Consagra’s one man show took place in
the same year at the Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bolzano,
then presented at Palazzo Sertoli and Palazzo Pretorio
in Sondrio.
Consagra died on July 16, 2005, in Milan.
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