Agostino Bonalumi was born on 10 July 1935 in Vimercate, an industrial suburb north of Milan. Entirely self-taught in fine art techniques, he went on to study technical and mechanical drawing at the Institute Tecnico Industriale with a view to becoming a tracer. This, however, was abandoned, and he went on to pursue a career as an artist as soon as he left university. After his first solo exhibition, which took place at the Galleria Totti, Milan in 1956, Bonalumi was introduced to Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani at the studio of Enrico Baj. Both a friendship and a working relationship were formed, and Bonalumi would continue to exhibit and collaborate with these two artists for much of his early career, with collective exhibitions in Rome, Lausanne and at Milan’s Galleria Pater being shown throughout 1958. Arguably, it was this moment that really kickstarted Bonalumi’s career, earning him a reputation throughout Italy.
In his work Bonalumi’s main aim is to give shape to the tensions of space, offering through and elasticity of colour a new take on the art-life duality. His work represents the pure space of experience, excluding any sign or symbolic element, in a dimension of totality that has led experts to describe them as ‘metaforms’ that are ‘generated by a geometric matrix of the imagination’. Each form he creates is a spatial thought of deliberately ambiguous, unsettling, elusive rationality.
The bronzes of Bonalumi are the models from the 1960s that are once again brought to life. They are the same, yet different: the bronze cast recreates the same physical form, yet the reflective nature of the material makes the work interact with and rely upon its surrounding space. ‘You see, bronze has to become live material. It has to induce a warm sensation, as organic material. It has to induce a warm sensation, as organic matter, and it has to have and emit the light of the August sun’. —Agostino Bonalumi
