.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Executed in 1978, Grande quadro equestre italiano is a striking example of Mario Schifano’s series of Quadri equestri (Equestrian Paintings). Across a monumental canvas more than two metres in height and width, the regal form of a horse emerges in the negative space created by gestural swathes of red, white, and green enamel—the colours of the Italian tricolore. The enamel drips and spills beyond the canvas onto the wooden frame, so that the frame is subsumed into the illusionistic space of the painting. In a self-referential touch, a painter’s palette made of paper is collaged into the lower centre. Held in the Grassi Collection for almost half a century, Grande quadro equestre italiano has been prominently exhibited in its lifetime, including within important solo exhibitions of the artist at the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Palazzo del Ridotto, Cesena in 1980, and the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, across 2001-2002. More recently, it was included in the major survey of contemporary Italian painting, Painting is Back. The Eighties, Painting in Italy at the Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, in 2021. A special issue of Flash Art was published to coincide with the exhibition, for which the present work was illustrated on the cover.
Schifano broke out onto the international stage as a leading member of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, a loose artistic movement that emerged in early-1960s Rome. His highly layered surfaces investigated the construction of images, often drawing upon the language of billboards and road signs. His early Monocromi (Monochromes) brought him to the attention of gallerist Ileana Sonnabend, and a visit to the United States in 1962 would prove pivotal, bringing him into contact with icons of American Pop Art such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. He began to play subversively with the logos of major American companies such as Coca-Cola and Esso, whose advertising permeated post-war Italy. Throughout the 1970s he found himself wrestling with his identity as a painter. In 1976, two years after his important mid-career retrospective at the Palazzo della Pilotta in Parma, he stopped painting altogether for a period, before returning to the canvas with renewed vigour the year the present work was painted. He began to mine art history and contemporary visual culture, creating new cycles of works including the Quadri equestri, which he presented at the Venice Biennale in 1978.
The elegant figure of a horse which dominates the present work’s composition was replicated across the Quadri equesti. At the time, Schifano was looking to Italy’s art-historical iconography, and the motif may have been inspired by Etruscan sculpture. Schifano’s father had been an archaeologist in charge of the Leptis Magna excavations in Libya, where the artist was born. When the family returned to Rome shortly after the end of the Second World War, Schifano began his career as an apprentice to his father at the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, and this imagery suffused Schifano’s early visual education. Combined with the distinctive colours of the Italian tricolore, the horse takes on further national significance, recalling the equestrian statue of Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome, the centrepiece of a national monument built to honour the first king of a unified Italy. As Schifano weaves his rich cultural, historical and sociopolitical tableau, the painter’s palette collaged into the picture positions the artist himself as a central figure of nation-making.
Schifano broke out onto the international stage as a leading member of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo, a loose artistic movement that emerged in early-1960s Rome. His highly layered surfaces investigated the construction of images, often drawing upon the language of billboards and road signs. His early Monocromi (Monochromes) brought him to the attention of gallerist Ileana Sonnabend, and a visit to the United States in 1962 would prove pivotal, bringing him into contact with icons of American Pop Art such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. He began to play subversively with the logos of major American companies such as Coca-Cola and Esso, whose advertising permeated post-war Italy. Throughout the 1970s he found himself wrestling with his identity as a painter. In 1976, two years after his important mid-career retrospective at the Palazzo della Pilotta in Parma, he stopped painting altogether for a period, before returning to the canvas with renewed vigour the year the present work was painted. He began to mine art history and contemporary visual culture, creating new cycles of works including the Quadri equestri, which he presented at the Venice Biennale in 1978.
The elegant figure of a horse which dominates the present work’s composition was replicated across the Quadri equesti. At the time, Schifano was looking to Italy’s art-historical iconography, and the motif may have been inspired by Etruscan sculpture. Schifano’s father had been an archaeologist in charge of the Leptis Magna excavations in Libya, where the artist was born. When the family returned to Rome shortly after the end of the Second World War, Schifano began his career as an apprentice to his father at the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, and this imagery suffused Schifano’s early visual education. Combined with the distinctive colours of the Italian tricolore, the horse takes on further national significance, recalling the equestrian statue of Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome, the centrepiece of a national monument built to honour the first king of a unified Italy. As Schifano weaves his rich cultural, historical and sociopolitical tableau, the painter’s palette collaged into the picture positions the artist himself as a central figure of nation-making.