(Venice 1919–2006)
Visione Contemporanea, 1952, painting and egg tempera on canvas, 130 x 170 cm, framed

This work is registered in the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Venice and is accompanied by a photo certificate of authenticity

Provenance:
Galleria d’Arte Maggiore, Bologna (stamp on the reverse)
Private Collection, Italy
Pandolfini Casa d’Aste, 22 November 2002, lot 112
Private Collection, Rovereto
Private Collection, Brescia
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Venice, XXVI Esposzione Biennale Internazionale d’Arte, 1952, exh. cat. p. 148, no. 34 with ill.
Hannover-Köln-Berlin, Acht italienische Maler. Afro, Birolli, Corpora, Moreni, Morlotti, Santomaso, Turcato, Vedova, (curated by L. Caramel), Kestner Gesellschaft-Galerie Ferdinand Müller-Haus am Waldsee, 1953, exh. cat. no. 56 with ill.
VIII Premio Nazionale di pittura Michetti, Francavilla al Mare 1954, with ill. (label on the reverse)
Brescia, la Bella Italia, Galleria Agnellini, 2014, exh. cat. pp.86–89 with ill.
Brescia, Picasso, De Chirico, Morandi. 100 capolavori del XIX e XX secolo dalle collezioni private bresciane, Palazzo Martinengo, 2018, exh. cat. pp. 220–221 with ill.

Literature:
Arte Italiana all’estero, 1952
Arti Visive 3, rivista della Fondazione Origine, Città di Castello 1952
L. Caramel (ed.), Premio Michetti: 50 Edizioni, 1948-98, Electa, Milan 1998, p. 43, no. 19 with ill.

The latest Vedova is not so different from the one that first emerged ten or more years ago.
It is clear that his experience is greater, that there are no hiccups or formal uncertainties, but the painter's spirit is always dramatic, with continuous impulses and reminders of the disorder of a temperament in which intelligence struggles with passion.

Vedova, full of aggressive, unrestrained impulses, sets his paintings to the rhythm of a frenetic dynamism. His hand runs faster than his brain, in a creative automatism as sensitive as a seismograph.

Vedova possesses an immense modern "pictorial" instinct: he possesses it by instinct, with an infallible certainty of the value and meaning of every means of expression. His problems still include Cubism and Futurism, and they are problems of spatial representation: of continuity and multiplicity, either on the level of analogical series or on the level of the faceting of forms in a kind of swirling motion in depth. Vedova portrays his own anguish in these abysses, maintaining the austerity of black and white which, for him, is still colour. He divides the composition into zones, like a "collage", in order to attempt new suggestions with contrasts of light and shade, on the track of an upset, hallucinated, obsessive drawing, on the divergent lines of a centrifugal motion. It gives the impression of spinning fragments. But this disintegrated fantasy world, sinking into an anguished space, binds together, in the discordant elements, under the sign of the strong individuality of the vision.
Giuseppe Marchiori in Emilio Vedova, SALA XXII, XXVI Biennale di Venezia, exh. cat. Ed. Alfieri, Venice, 1952

The painting Visione contemporanea (Contemporary Vision) of 1952 (initially known as Immagine del tempo [Image of Time]), which won the prize at the 8th edition of the Michetti Prize in Francavilla al Mare in 1954, is part of this period and bears witness to the dramatic and, so to speak, conflicting tone of Vedova's painting.
This tone describes the personal and collective unease of a given historical moment through explosions of contrasting brushstrokes, without recourse to colour (only black, white and shades of grey are used), with vigorous sharp signs and broken, and fractured lines in which there is still a trace of the plastic energy of the Futurists and above all of Boccioni, albeit within a language that was by then informal.
Paolo Bolpagni, Emilio Vedova-Visione contemporanea, in, De Chirico, Morandi. 100 capolavori del XIX e XX secolo dalle collezioni private bresciane, Brescia, Palazzo Martinengo, 2018, exh. cat.

“The overlapping, interpenetrating contrasts of the black and white break up perspectives, evoke moving images of space, a space that is apocalyptically crumbling behind bars.
The surface becomes the place in which a dramatically
expressive spatial structure appears. As with colour, space
also becomes an independent player.”
Haftmann, Vedova 1960, Wedewer p. 258