Untitled (double-sided), 1973

Carlo Zinelli started making art after being institutionalized in Verona, Italy in 1947. He began by using bricks and nails to incise the walls of his room and the outdoor courtyard of the asylum. Later, spending 8 hours a day with tempera paints and colored pencils in the then newly founded patients’ artist studio, Zinelli created an extensive oeuvre of more than 3,000 works. An example of his later work, this drawing illustrates the disparate experiences of his early and later life, with motifs including animals, farm figures, soldiers and vehicles. His repetition of figures, visual arrangements and spatial cadence have an almost musical structure to them, ultimately harmonizing and creating a continuous story from beginning to end, recto to verso.