(Turin 1871–1958 Rome)
Uccello futurista-motivo per piatto, c. 1925, signed FUTUR BALLA; three stamps “Pugno di Boccioni” on the reverse, tempera and collage on cardboard, diameter 27.5 cm , framed

Photo certificate:
Archivio Elena Gigli, Rome 24 June 2011, archive no. 509/2011

Provenance:
Casa Balla, Rome
C. M. Bigiarelli Collection, Rome
Farsetti , Prato 2011, lot 753 (certificate available)
European Private Collection

Literature:
E. Gigli, Giacomo Balla. Coloratissimo e luminosissimo, Edizioni Cinquantasei, Bologna 2013, p. 181, no. T26 with ill.

“In Pier Luigi Fortunati’s interview (in “L’Impero”, Rome, 20-21 June 1925) Balla speaks of Paris as a city invaded by Futurism: the enormous affiches, the fantastical reclames lit up in the evening, the asymmetrical windows with brightly burnished brass, all fit perfectly with the fast-paced tumult of life on the boulevards onto which flow the thousands of the midinettes emerging from the Lafayette and the Louvre. I took many notes on new motifs for decorations and fabric, furniture, scarves, shawls, and futuristic hats that I hope to realise and launch shortly.
Upon his return from Paris in the 1920s, Balla resumed the collage technique (with which he had already experimented at the time of the First World War) in order to create a series of new, lively works, in some of which – as in this case – the image is constructed through the mirroring of the design itself. The final composition is thus created with gilded paper cut in rounded shapes, with the addition of brown and gold tempera points – all set against a blue background (the sky), also in tempera, like orange rays of sunlight.
In 1931, Balla confessed to Raffaele Simboli: “No, I am not a painter: I cut, I operate, so I am a surgeon. But that does not mean that I do not also dabble in art.”
Elena Gigli