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Lot Essay
"I always use elements which are given and simple; I never want to add anything or eliminate. I have never had any desire to deform; I isolate and I represent. My themes come from the present, from familiar situations, from daily life; because I never intervene actively against the object; I feel the magic of its presence" (Domenico Gnoli, extracts from an interview with Jean-Luc Daval, Journal de Geneva, 1968)
A disturbingly real and seemingly obsessive portrait of a striped shirt, Camicia a righe is one of five important paintings that Gnoli chose as key examples of his oeuvre at the exhibition Metropolitan scene: Images and objects in 1966. Part of the competition for the prestigious Marzotto Prize, the exhibition toured many of Europe's most important galleries of modern art, including the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Tate Gallery in London, and included the work of some of the foremost young artists of the day from Arman to Hockney, Peter Brüning to Christo. Gnoli was one of only two Italian artists invited to exhibit, and the five works which he selected represented almost the full range of his subject matter; a table-cloth, a woman's dress, a shirt collar, a sofa, and the present work, one of his finest paintings of a shirt.
As with much of Gnoli's work, Camicia a righe looks at reality with such an obsessive attention to detail, in its folds, pleats and its texture that it almost begins to appear as an abstraction. In the exhibition catalogue Gnoli attempted to explain how his metaphysical aesthetic, in some ways similar to that of contemporary Pop Art, had its roots in Italian art and culture. 'In a moment like this, characterised by an iconoclastic anti-painting credo, breaking all bridges with the past, I am committed to place my work in that "non - rhetorical" tradition that was born in Italy in the fifteenth century and arrived with us through the scuola metafisica as its latest manifestation. Whilst the experience of those who wanted to interpret, deform, break down and re-create is, on my opinion, over, reality offers itself to us undaunted and intact. The object from every-day life, isolated from its usual context, looks like the most disturbing indicator of our solitude, without any help, anymore, from ideologies and certainties' (exh. cat, The Marzotto Price 1966, London 1966, note to no. 45).
A disturbingly real and seemingly obsessive portrait of a striped shirt, Camicia a righe is one of five important paintings that Gnoli chose as key examples of his oeuvre at the exhibition Metropolitan scene: Images and objects in 1966. Part of the competition for the prestigious Marzotto Prize, the exhibition toured many of Europe's most important galleries of modern art, including the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Tate Gallery in London, and included the work of some of the foremost young artists of the day from Arman to Hockney, Peter Brüning to Christo. Gnoli was one of only two Italian artists invited to exhibit, and the five works which he selected represented almost the full range of his subject matter; a table-cloth, a woman's dress, a shirt collar, a sofa, and the present work, one of his finest paintings of a shirt.
As with much of Gnoli's work, Camicia a righe looks at reality with such an obsessive attention to detail, in its folds, pleats and its texture that it almost begins to appear as an abstraction. In the exhibition catalogue Gnoli attempted to explain how his metaphysical aesthetic, in some ways similar to that of contemporary Pop Art, had its roots in Italian art and culture. 'In a moment like this, characterised by an iconoclastic anti-painting credo, breaking all bridges with the past, I am committed to place my work in that "non - rhetorical" tradition that was born in Italy in the fifteenth century and arrived with us through the scuola metafisica as its latest manifestation. Whilst the experience of those who wanted to interpret, deform, break down and re-create is, on my opinion, over, reality offers itself to us undaunted and intact. The object from every-day life, isolated from its usual context, looks like the most disturbing indicator of our solitude, without any help, anymore, from ideologies and certainties' (exh. cat, The Marzotto Price 1966, London 1966, note to no. 45).