(Rovereto 1901–1986 Milan)
Due Curve, 1973/1974, with stamp FIAT steel under the base, stainless steel, 128 x 60 x 42 cm

This work is no. 1 from an edition of 3.

This work is registered in the Archivio Fausto Melotti, Milan and it is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity.

Provenance:
Cristina Melotti Collection, Milan
Paolo Baldacci Collection, New York
Volker Feierabend, Milan
Private Collection, Milan
Galleria d’Arte Niccoli, Parma (certificate available)
Private Collection, Switzerland
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Düsseldorf, Galerie Schmela, Melotti, 7 – 20 February 1975, exh. cat.
Genoa, Martini Ronchetti Galleria d’arte contemporanea, Fausto Melotti, 9 May – 12 June 1975, exh. cat. no. 4 with ill.
Sanremo, Galleria Beniamino, Fausto Melotti, 12 July – 1 August 1975, exh. cat.
Milan, Palazzo Reale, Melotti, 16 May – 17 June 1979, exh. cat. p. 73, with ill.
Bologna, Villa Cicogna, Fausto Melotti, 12 – 30 June 1980, exh. cat. no. 2 with ill.
La Chaux-de-Fonds, Zurich, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Fausto Melotti, 21 February – 29 March 1981, travelling to Galerie Lopes AG, 
9 April – 27 May 1981, exh. cat. no. 10 with ill.
Rovereto, Area Studio, Fausto Melotti, May – June 1984, exh. cat. p. 45 with ill.
Lisbon Centro de Arte Moderna, Fondazione Calouste Gulbenkian, Primeira Exposicao - Dialgo sobra a Arte Contemporanea en Europa, 28 March – 16 June 1985, exh. cat. p. 275 with ill.
Parma, La Sanseverina Galleria d’Arte, Fausto Melotti, 10 May – 30 June 1986, exh. cat. no. 13, p. 20 with ill.
New York, Paolo Baldacci Gallery, Fausto Melotti. Anti-sculpture, 4 October – 12 November 1994, exh. cat. p. 60, no. 15 with ill.
London, Robilant+Voena, Italian Postwar Sculpture, 4 October – 17 November 2017, exh. cat. p. 31 with ill.

Literature:
V. Conti, Un gioco che quando riesce è poesia in “Corriere Mercantile”, Genoa, 16 May 1975, with ill.
G. Celant, Melotti. Catalogo generale. Sculture 1973–1989 e Bassorilievi, Milan 1996, Vol. II, p. 377, no. 1973 77 with ill. (with wrong dimensions)

Fausto Melotti is regarded as the pioneer of geometric abstraction in Italy. His artistic examination is based on the two disciplinary pillars of music/poetry and the art of engineering. In their diametrically opposed intentions, these two pillars constitute the antithetical character of the artist’s works. It is an oscillation between minimalism and metaphor, between abstract geometric structures and figurative, poetic ones.

Following initial technical training, Melotti turned to sculpture in the mid-1920s. From early on, his work was characterised by a constant search for new design possibilities and materials: stone, plaster, bronze and clay are used as well as copper and steel. The parsimony in the means of expression is due to the quest for a substantial and essential representation. In 1933/34, Melotti’s formal artistic language matured further when he joined the circle of rationalist abstractionists around the Galleria del Milione in Milan, where he devoted himself to strictly geometric construction in the Platonic sense. At the centre is the idea of modulazione, which comes from “module = rule = order”. The simplification of form in these early works anticipates the minimalism of his later work.

From the 1950s onwards, Melotti’s drives his art inspired by Alexander Calder and Alberto Giacometti to filigree lightness and spatial transparency. The sculptures seem weightless and airy, like a “play which, when it succeeds, is poetry” (Melotti). This play results from the tension between the opposite poles expressed: figuration and abstraction, fantasy and ratio, poetry and technique, lightness and melancholy.

The all-round sculpture Due Curve from 1973/74, elevates the geometric figures of circle, line and rectangle into three-dimensionality. Staggered on a square iron plate, two curved, rectangular strips rise into the surrounding space. These heftier elements are contrasted by a curved rod mounted opposite them, to which is attached a downward-headed metallic thread with completing sphere. The varying density and lightness of the elements, together with the curving composition lines striving in various directions, create dynamics and tension. The polished surface of the object acts like a mirror, whereby the figure is simultaneously closed in on itself and in contact with its surroundings, which it reflects. This practice is reminiscent of works by the Franco-Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi.

As a revolutionary of modern sculpture, Brancusi paves the way for material awareness and the reduction of forms. In his work, the poles of tension between the radically modern and the radically archaic are driven apart to the limit of the possible, only to be brought together again harmoniously afterwards. Brancusi’s stubbornly ontological view of art — that through extreme simplification of the form without ornamentation and superfluousness, the essence of things is brought to the centre, so that the inner context, the inner truth of the object has the possibility to appear on the outside — is also reflected in Fausto Melotti, in his continuation of the radical ideas of modernised sculpture of the 50s and 60s.