1960s Large Brutalist Patinated Bronze Wall Sculpture by Enrico Donati

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Rare Brutalist bronze wall sculpture by Enrico Donati. Stunning patina. From a very small edition of 6. Signed.

Strong back … Read more Rare Brutalist bronze wall sculpture by Enrico Donati. Stunning patina. From a very small edition of 6. Signed.

Strong back brackets for easy anchoring to a wall.

Enrico Donati (1909 – 2008) was an Italian-American Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor. He studied economics at the Università degli Studi, Pavia, and in 1934 moved to the USA, where he attended the New School for Social Research and the Art Students League of New York. His first one-man shows were in New York in 1942, at the New School for Social Research and the Passedoit Gallery. At this stage he was clearly drawn to Surrealism. Recognition of his abilities by the renowned art historian Lionello Venturi led to a meeting with André Breton in 1942. Impressed by Donati’s paintings, Surrealism’s founder and pontifical grand master pronounced him a Surrealist on the spot and mustered him, as a younger peer, into the company of such Surrealists as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Yves Tanguy. typical work of this period, St Elmo’s Fire (1944; New York, MoMA), contains strange organic formations suggestive of underwater life. Donati was one of the organizers of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme held in Paris in the summer of 1947, to which he contributed a painting and two sculptures. In the late 1940s he responded to the crisis in Surrealism by going through a Constructivist phase, from which he developed a calligraphic style and drew onto melted tar, or diluted paint with turpentine. He also became associated with Spatialism, founded by Lucio Fontana. Thus began his long fascination with surface and texture, including mixing paint with dust. He began exploring this approach in 1950 when he discovered that dirt removed from vacuum cleaners and combined with pigment and glue before being applied in thick layers to canvas produced opaque wooly surfaces ideal for the dense blacks, luminous greys, and occasional whites he was now using almost exclusively in his painting, that culminated in the 1950s in his Moonscapes, a series that has similarities with the work of Jean Dubuffet. This work shared some of characteristics of work produced during this period by a number of America’s finest avant-garde painters. (Mark Rothko, in particular, springs to mind, as do Franz Kline and Ad Reinhardt.) Donati, however, had acquired this vision and had developed these characteristics for his art independently, without any concession to the vision or art of others. And so, quietly and on his own terms, Donati entered the mainstream of American art. Donati joined the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where he exhibited alongside Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Theodoros Stamos, all members of the New York School. The fossil became a major theme for Donati through the 1960s, and he gave new importance to color in his Fossil works, for example in Red Yellow Fossil (1964; Miami, Hills Col., see Selz, p. 19). He was also associated with the Art Informel and Tachisme and Cobra Painters, Lyrical Abstraction, Outsider Art, Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, Nicolas de Stael, Karel Appel, Sam Francis, COBRA, Antonio Saura, Antoni Tapies, In 1961, he was given a major retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and frequently exhibited at group shows in the USA and elsewhere.
He held a number of important teaching and advisory posts, including Visiting Lecturer at Yale University (1962–1972).
Considered by some in the art world to be one of the last of the Surrealists, Enrico Donati died in his home in Manhattan on April 25, 2008, aged 99.

Selected museums and collections:
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Museum of Fine Art of Houston, Texas
Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Belgium
Museum of International Center of Aesthetic Research, Turin, Italy
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York
The Detroit Institute of Art, Michigan
University of Michigan Art Gallery, Michigan
Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland·
Newark Museum Association, New Jersey
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome
Mitchener Foundation, Pennsylvania
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts
The Rockefeller Institute, New York
Johns Hopkins Hospital, Maryland
Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut
Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington D.C. Tougaloo College, Mississippi
The Israel Museum, Israel
University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley
University of Texas, Austin
Museum of Fine Arts, Florida
Tacoma Art Museum, Washington
The Lowe Museum, University of Miami, Florida
High Museum of Art, Georgia
Seattle Art Museum, Washington
Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Vassar College, New York
Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
Minnesota Museum of Art, Minnesota
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian, Washington D.C.
Arturo Schwarz Surrealist Foundation, Italy
Gallerie di Piazza Scala, Milan, Italy, magma bianco

Selected solo exhibitions:
2007, The Surreal World of Enrico Donati, de Young Museum, San Francisco
2006, Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, California
2004, 2005 Gallerie Les yeux fertiles, Paris
2000-04 Galerie Yoram Gil, West Hollywood, California
1995-97 Maxwell Davidson Gallery, New York
1995-97 Horwitch Gallery, Scottsdale
1986, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993 Louis Newman Galleries, Beverly Hills
1989 Galerie Zabriskie, Paris
1987 Zabriskie Gallery, New York
1985 Georges Fall, Paris
1994, 1990 Carone Gallery, Fort Lauderdale
1984, 1986, 1987 Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer, New York·1980 Grand Palais, FIAC, Paris
1980 Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs
1979 Osuna Gallery, Washington D.C.
1979 Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.
1979 Norton Gallery, Palm Beach
1978 Wildenstein Art Center, Houston
1978 Davenport Municipal Art Gallery, Iowa
1977 Fairweather Hardin Gallery, Chicago
1977 Tennessee Fine Arts Center, Nashville
1977 Chrysler Museum, Norfolk
1977, 1979, 1982 Ankrum Gallery, Los Angeles
1977 Minnesota Museum of Art, St. Paul
1965 Obelisk Gallery, Washington D.C.
1964 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
1964, 1966 J.L. Hudson Gallery, Detroit
1962-1982 Staempfli Gallery, New York
1962 Neue Gallery, Munich
1961 Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
1954, 1955, 1957, 1959, 1960 Betty Parsons Gallery, New York
1953 Naviglio, Milan
1952, 1953 Cavallino, Venice
1952 Alexander Iolas Gallery, New York
1950 Galleria del Milione, Milan·1950 Obelisco, Rome
1950 Paul Rosenberg Gallery, New York
1947 Galerie Drouant Gallery, Paris
1947, 1958 Syracuse University, New York
1945-47, 1949 Durand Ruel, New York
1944, 1959 Chicago Arts Club, Chicago
1944 G. Place Gallery, Washington D.C.
1942, 1944 Passedoit Gallery, New York See less