(Venice 1919–2006)
Tensione, N 4 V, 1959, signed, dated and titled Emilio Vedova / Tensione 1959 N. 4. V on the reverse, oil on canvas, 145.5 x 196 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galleria Blu, Milan (stamp on the reverse)
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Milan, Emilio Vedova, Galleria Blu, from 29 February 1960, exh. cat. no. 9 with ill. (Immagine del tempo 1959, n. 5, V.)
Milan, Mostra di pittura contemporanea Comunità Europea Premio Marzotto 1960, Palazzo della Permanente, 22 October - 20 November 1960, exh. cat. p. 117, no. 261 (label on the reverse)
Brussels, Prix Marzotto, Société auxiliaire des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts, January 1961, cat. no. 261 (label on the reverse)

Literature:
C. L. Ragghianti , Critica d’Arte, no. 33, anno VI, Vallecchi ed., Florence 1959 (cover image)

Just after the mid-point of the 1950s, Vedova had exhausted his forays into geometry, and turned his hand instead to an extraordinary recovery of the action painting of his early artistic experiments. An immediate, intuitive, and gestural style of painting was conceived anew, as if the distance to his own youthful experiences exposed pictorial material suitable for a fantastical, previously unthinkable, re-elaboration. [...] The untitled works of 1956, and the cycle of 1961-62 are hymns to Vedova’s refound happiness. Sumptuous colours traverse the canvas along the diagonal, brushstrokes shatter against each other where formal structures, characteristic of Vedova’s pictorial style until the previous year, survive. The geometry of signs has disappeared, but the drama of light and colour remains. Black and white have not yet been freed, as they would later be, but they are already present.
C. Bertelli, Vedova: Attenzione! Lavori in corso,
in “Emilio Vedova” 2006