ENRICO BAJ
2015-12-28With a passion for the eccentric and a strong iconoclastic impulse, Enrico Baj was one of the central figures of the Italian neo-avant garde. His art and political writings have played an instrumental role in the chronologies of influential movements, from Dada and Surrealism to Art Informel and Cobra, as well as the Milanese movement of Nuclear Art, which he co-founded with Sergio Dangelo. Throughout it all, Baj formed an idiosyncratic iconography that was all his own. Departing from gestural abstraction in the mid-1950s, he honed a painterly practice that defiantly embraced figuration and kitsch symbols, subverting authoritative, bourgeois conventions of “good taste.”
In the late 1960s Enrico Baj’s main focus was on his Plastics. During this period he began exploring the aesthetic possibilities of all different kinds of plastic materials. His first steps into the new medium were made with little multi-coloured Lego bricks that Baj included into his conventional tapestry canvases, thereby adding a very contemporary, colourful and pop art component to his otherwise plushy fabric backgrounds. He cut, assembled and superimposed onto the entire spectrum that was offered by these new industrial materials: PVC, lego, polyethylene, polyester – all this gave birth to numberless colourful characters, landscapes and his ultimate series of loud and varicoloured neckties.
Opposite – Cravatta, 1968
Exhibition runs through to January 31st, 2016
Giò Marconi
via Tadino 20
I-20124 Milan
Italy
