Vintage Giulio Turcato 'Degri Vagutto' Abstract Italian Modernist Color Etching

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This is just a great original piece. I bought this piece without knowing who the artist is. In fact, I … Read more This is just a great original piece. I bought this piece without knowing who the artist is. In fact, I have sat with it for a few months until I was finally able to figure out who the artist is. I finally figured out that this is an incredible minimalist work by important italian artist giulio turcato. For those not familiar with the artist, I have included his biography below. This is a wonderful example of the artist's work. One of his most minimalist pieces. Often he uses a color background but I think what makes this one so special is that it is simply the color lines against a white background. Etching in red with the plate image size measuring 7 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered 7/50 in pencil below the image. Wonderful red and white print. Overall excellent condition with just a few faint spots at the very top of the print into the margins. Otherwise as printed condition. Print is is a simple matte and framed that are complimentary. Frame measures 17 x 22 1/4 inches. Happy to ship without the frame if you are going to reframe it in a more suitable frame.

For those not familiar with the artist his biography from a gallery that sells the artist's work reads: "giulio turcato was born in mantua in 1912. His youth was a nomadic one of “a hard existence,” roaming from venice to milan to palermo to rome, where he settled in 1943 and participated actively in the resistance, joining the communist party. Here, with his participation in oppo’s fourth quadriennale (his last), he began a dense series of shows including, in the years that followed, such manifestations as l’arte contro la barbarie (art against barbarism), a collective show at the galleria del secolo, where he signed a “neo-cubist manifesto” together with corpora and guttuso (1946), the first show of “fronte nuovo delle arti” in milan (1947), that movement’s participation at the venice biennale in 1948, and all the main events involving “forma”, the group of young artists (including dorazio, perilli, accardi, sanfilippo and consagra), of which he was a member since its foundation in march 1947. In 1949, at a new show at the secolo, turcato made clear his reluctance either to espouse the dogmatic thesis of politically and socially engaged art and hence to join the nascent “socialist realism” movement or to fully accept the dictates of formalist abstraction, in which he immediately saw the risk of slipping into academicism. This won him a long-lasting ostracism and suspicion that dogged his painting, increasingly founded on the free expansion of tone-colour, even in subsequent decades, after turcato’s art had been acknowledged as one of the great achievements in the italian art of the later twentieth century, also gaining broad international recognition in his mature and later years. Giulio turcato died in rome in 1995." See less