GIANNI COLOMBO – Spazio Elastico (Elastic Space)

Art Basel Miami first time exhibitors ROBILANT+VOENA will present a curated selection of works by GIANNI COLOMBO belonging to the “Spazio elastico” cycle of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Colombo realized his fist environment entitled “Spazio elastico” in 1967, at Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum in Graz (Austria), for the seminal exhibition Trigon 67, also exhibited at the XXXVI Venice Biennale of 1968, where it won the Prize of the City of Venice reserved for an Italian artist. This work represented a turning point in Colombo’s artistic career as it expanded his research towards the interaction between space, time and viewer, which he had begun to pursue between the late 1950s. As a direct evolution of Lucio Fontana’s “Concetti spaziali” (spatial concepts) and “Ambienti spaziali” (spatial environments), which in the early Postwar years had been defining a conceptual space beyond the two dimensions of the canvas, Colombo’s “Spazio elastico” works investigate the physicality of our relationship with space, generating a psychological dynamic based on the unity of body and mind.

ROBILANT+VOENA’s Art Basel Miami booth will include projects Colombo executed for this 1967 environment, in addition to 9 subsequent independent works exemplifying his experimentation with the elastic space within wall based objects. Made of mixed media including wood and wire, and variously activated via electrical motors or manually, these works display Colombo’s consistent interrogation of the potentialities of altered, moving, flexible space. The viewer’s direct connection with real space, experienced in a total way, both physically and psychically, is central to these works, anticipating issues of perceptual and immersive discourse that are still vital today.

ROBILANT+VOENA Director Mira Dimitrova said: “The works from the Spazio Elastico cycle remain some of the most innovative and challenging works to have emerged from Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and deserve broader international attention, hence our decision to exhibit them at Art Basel Miami and introduce them to the US and international public.”

This presentation follows on from the monographic exhibition GIANNI COLOMBO The Body and the Space 1959- 1980 which took place in October at ROBILANT+VOENA London. Featuring over 30 works by the artist, including his seminal environment Topoestesia from 1970, the exhibition was the first solo show of the artist in the UK.

GIANNI COLOMBO (Milan 1937 – Melzo 1993)
In the Milan of 1959, during the midst of a Europe-wide wave of artistic fervour, Colombo founded Gruppo T with Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gabriele De Vecchi and later Grazia Varisco, and exhibited at Galleria Azimut. The idea of works that the viewer can directly interact with, realized in various and experimental materials, was from this point onwards to be his recurrent theme, both in his object pieces and in the more than sixty environments he realized, which questioned the visitor’s behavioural and sensory perceptions. It was during the 1960s and 1970s that Colombo’s popularity and success flourished, exhibiting in an increasing number of shows both in Italy and abroad. He was also present at various occasions at the Venice Biennale, where in 1968 he was awarded a special prize for his environment Spazio elastico (Elastic Space).

His work is represented in important public collections, such as Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome), MART Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Trento e Rovereto), Museo del Novecento and Collezione Intesa Sanpaolo, Gallerie d’Italia – Piazza Scala (Milan), Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Rivoli, Turin), Museo Cantonale d’Arte (Lugano), Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti (Zagreb), Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum (Graz), Hilti Art Foundation (Schaan), MoMA The Museum of Modern Art (New York), and others.