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Lot Essay
This work is recorded in the artist's archives under number 3332.
In the early 1960s Vedova described his unique brand of gestural abstraction as 'a cry for freedom at all costs' (E. Vedova, Scontro di Situazioni, lecture on 27 September 1962). Inspired by the Informel movement with which his work has often been associated, Vedova sought to articulate a new freedom of action and construct a new visual language that was rooted in both the depths of matter and in the psychological depths into which Europe had been plunged in the aftermath of the Second World War. Painted in 1960, Varsavia (Warsaw) is a striking example of Vedova's attempt to pictorially build what he called a 'structure' of 'consciousness'.
In a lecture he gave in 1962 (ibid.), Vedova asserted that the cultural climate of the Post-War period was one in which 'people find themselves again in matter' and that it was this immersion in matter and in the material nature of reality that had generated its own tabula rasa. A 'blank tablet (has been) achieved', he explained, 'Europe's consciousness plunges into darkness. Sartre humiliates mankind by constantly keeping before one's own eyes one's own failures. Myth and courage are deprived of their values. They are being mocked. The indefinite, the Informel (becomes) the rendez-vous ...and one sinks into chaos... The Informel... annihilates all objects like a magma which keeps on melting and compacting within an overgrowing universe, the boundless taste for matter and trait has not succeeded to show us a new dimension. Of course, one cannot speak of doubt and denial, or voice a possible structure, or a choice of language, if one has not yet sunk to the depths of it all. And this cannot be a permanent situation, since one will get worn out. Didn't this situation originate a morbid taste and the exacerbated formalisation of matter and trait? A sort of self-defence, an extreme consciousness, contributed to make it possible for me not to be lost in such a state... Seeing the tension of my bursting and erupting traits, one finds the right label at once: Informel! Yet this is superficial. My works are being built up ... and these structures are the structures of my own consciousness' (ibid.).
With its energetic but cohesive sense of surface, Varsavia is a painterly metaphor of the kind of re-building process Vedova outlined in his lecture. Associated with the name 'Warsaw' is also the notion of a city razed to the ground and risen again from the ashes of disaster. Warsaw is itself therefore an appropriate metaphor for the cultural regeneration Vedova was seeking to establish through paintings such as the present work.
In the early 1960s Vedova described his unique brand of gestural abstraction as 'a cry for freedom at all costs' (E. Vedova, Scontro di Situazioni, lecture on 27 September 1962). Inspired by the Informel movement with which his work has often been associated, Vedova sought to articulate a new freedom of action and construct a new visual language that was rooted in both the depths of matter and in the psychological depths into which Europe had been plunged in the aftermath of the Second World War. Painted in 1960, Varsavia (Warsaw) is a striking example of Vedova's attempt to pictorially build what he called a 'structure' of 'consciousness'.
In a lecture he gave in 1962 (ibid.), Vedova asserted that the cultural climate of the Post-War period was one in which 'people find themselves again in matter' and that it was this immersion in matter and in the material nature of reality that had generated its own tabula rasa. A 'blank tablet (has been) achieved', he explained, 'Europe's consciousness plunges into darkness. Sartre humiliates mankind by constantly keeping before one's own eyes one's own failures. Myth and courage are deprived of their values. They are being mocked. The indefinite, the Informel (becomes) the rendez-vous ...and one sinks into chaos... The Informel... annihilates all objects like a magma which keeps on melting and compacting within an overgrowing universe, the boundless taste for matter and trait has not succeeded to show us a new dimension. Of course, one cannot speak of doubt and denial, or voice a possible structure, or a choice of language, if one has not yet sunk to the depths of it all. And this cannot be a permanent situation, since one will get worn out. Didn't this situation originate a morbid taste and the exacerbated formalisation of matter and trait? A sort of self-defence, an extreme consciousness, contributed to make it possible for me not to be lost in such a state... Seeing the tension of my bursting and erupting traits, one finds the right label at once: Informel! Yet this is superficial. My works are being built up ... and these structures are the structures of my own consciousness' (ibid.).
With its energetic but cohesive sense of surface, Varsavia is a painterly metaphor of the kind of re-building process Vedova outlined in his lecture. Associated with the name 'Warsaw' is also the notion of a city razed to the ground and risen again from the ashes of disaster. Warsaw is itself therefore an appropriate metaphor for the cultural regeneration Vedova was seeking to establish through paintings such as the present work.