Agostino Bonalumi

In 1959, Italian artist Agostino Bonalumi (1935–2013) began to create a new kind of sculptural painting, positioning wooden or steel elements behind the canvas to create protrusions, folds and other shapes. This catalog collects Bonalumi’s smaller-format works in this style, a scale that allowed him to experiment with shape and material.

One of the leading figures of postwar Italian art, influenced by Lucio Fontana, Agostino Bonalumi (1935–2013) challenged conceptions of pictorial space by stretching, slicing, creasing and pressing the surface of traditional canvases. This monograph documents these monochromatic “painting-objects” created throughout Bonalumi’s career.

The two-volume catalogue raisonné of the work of Agostino Bonalumi (1935–2013) is an essential tool for information on the artist, both in cultural terms and, more specifically, the contemporary art market. While the first volume provides a monographic study and examines the cultural context within which he worked for over half a century, the second constitutes the complete catalog of some two thousand works, from his debut to his death. The publication offers scholarly guidance for those wishing to understand the course of his work and provides details on his oeuvre thanks to the Archivio Agostino Bonalumi, which for years has tracked down and catalogued all his works and now makes the results available to collectors.

Agostino Bonalumi was born in Vimercate (Milan) in 1935. After technical studies, he embarked on an artistic career and exhibited for the first time in 1956. In 1958, together with Castellani and Manzoni, he constituted the initial core of what was soon to be the Azimuth group. In 1959, he invented extroversion, a technique he would successfully develop across the world in terms of stylistic variety (e.g. with the Zero group). Marco Meneguzzo, a renowned art historian and critic, is professor at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. A personal friend of the artist, he has curated pivotal exhibitions on Italian art between the 1950s and the 1980s. Fabrizio Bonalumi is Agostino Bonalumi’s son. Since 2006, he has been president of the Archivio Agostino Bonalumi. Beginning that same year, he has curated major exhibitions on the artist in Italy and abroad.

A stunning volume celebrating the work of Agostino Bonalumi during the 1960s and 1970s and its connection with other artists of the Azimut group. A selection of Bonalumi’s paintings from the 1960s and 1970s—including some unpublished and never before exhibited—form the core of this volume and confirm the important role played by this internationally lesser known artist in the development of modern art in Italy.

Francesca Pola is an art historian and critic; she teaches Contemporary Art.