Salvatore Scarpitta

Often described as the bridge between American Pop and Arte Povera, Salvatore Scarpitta was born in 1919 in Italy but raised in the United States, returning to Europe to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. With his dramatic move away from the traditional use of canvas, Scarpitta was part of the movement of avant-garde artists in Europe who sought to find a new direction for art after the destruction wrought by the Second World War. He found himself associating with artists such as Alberto Burri and Piero Dorazio, and even Cy Twombly (with whom he shared a studio between 1957–58), all of whom influenced Scarpitta’s work, and were in turn often influenced by it.

His best-known works from this period are his bandaged canvases — torn, stretched and wrapped with strips of fabric — which interrogated the materiality of painting and evoked themes of trauma, repair and corporeality. These works blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture, offering a visceral, tactile experience that paralleled the existential concerns of post-war Europe. In the 1960s, after moving back to the United States, Scarpitta became affiliated with the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, joining a roster of artists that included Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

In the later stages of his career, Scarpitta developed a deep fascination with speed and motion, creating sculptural constructions based on racing sleds and cars. These works, often full-scale and functional, spoke to ideas of freedom, risk and mortality, while retaining his signature emphasis on process and physical engagement with materials.

Throughout his life, Scarpitta remained committed to an art of intensity and experimentation. His work defied easy categorisation, balancing Italian traditions of Arte Informale with the raw immediacy of American abstraction and object-making. He died in 2007, leaving behind a body of work that remains both physically arresting and conceptually rich.