Private collection, Milan

One of Italy’s most important postwar sculptors, Pietro Consagra was born in 1920 in Mazara del Vallo in Sicily, and attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Palermo before moving in 1944 to Rome, just as the city was starting to commence its reconstruction in the wake of World War II. Consagra’s distinctive vision for a new form of abstract sculpture began to coalesce following a formative visit to Paris in 1946, which moreover marked the beginning of an active dialogue with the international avant-garde. Consagra rejected the traditions of three-dimensional sculpture with the aim of fostering a more direct mode of interaction between the work of art and its viewer. Working in marble, wood, iron, brass, and aluminium, Consagra created radical sculptures that flattened their materials almost to the point of two-dimensionality: in these abstract metal reliefs comprising silhouetted forms built up of overlapping rhythmical shapes, which catch light to create a sense of depth, Consagra achieved supreme balance between geometrical forms and figurative elements. Progressively emphasising the bi-dimensional character of his sculptures, by the 1960s, his art became one of low relief. In this way, he jettisoned the idea of an authoritarian center in favor of a “frontal” perspective that is open to a direct relationship, even a dialogue, with the viewer, which became his artistic credo.

With the advent of Pop Art and following Robert Rauschenberg’s victory at the Venice Biennale of 1964, Consagra embarked on a period of self-reflection, during which he began working intensely with paint. In the Piani Sospesi (Suspended Planes, 1964–65), the Ferri trasparenti (Transparent Irons, 1965–66), the Giardini (Gardens, 1965–66), and the Piani appesi (Hanging Planes, 1966–67). It is to this last series that Piano Appeso Alluminio Celeste, 1966–67, belongs. Consagra applied paint to the metal surfaces of his sculptures in the bright colors—reds, purples, blues, yellows, and pinks—made explosively popular by Pop Art. Given the industrial nature of the metal he used in his works, and their omnipresence in the urban environment, Consagra envisaged these monochrome pieces as transcendent emblems of a new formal and spiritual landscape, one which challenged the primacy and authority of the cities around us, privileging instead the perception, imagination, and humanity of the beholder.

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