Agostino Bonalumi was an Italian avant-garde artist of the post-war period who worked as a painter, draughtsman and sculptor. He is mostly known for his abstract object paintings called “extroflections” with their asymmetrical shapes.
Background
Agostino Bonalumi was born on July 10, 1935, in a Vimercate commune, Italy. He was the eldest boy of Abele Bonalumi, a pastry-cook, and Gemma Pelucchi. Bonalumi’s father was against the political regime by the time supporting the left wing and secretly joined the Italian Communist Party. Because of his political position, Abele had often to change the place of living.
Agostino Bonalumi had an elder sister named Rosa, and two younger brothers, Teodoro and Pierenrico.
Young Bonalumi helped his father to support the family assisting him at work.
Education
Agostino Bonalumi revealed his passion for painting at the early age. He finished school at the end of the World War II. He was an autodidact painter and studied technical and mechanical drawing.
Career
Agostino Bonalumi’s career began at the age of thirteen when his early creations were demonstrated at the National City Award of Vimercate (Premio Nazionale Città di Vimercate). Nine years later, the artist had his debut solo exhibition in Milan at the Galleria Totti.
There, in Milan, Bonalumi got acquainted with Enrico Baj, a co-founder of the Nuclear Movement, and Piero Manzoni. Manzoni, Castellani and Bonalumi formed a kind of the group and started to exhibit their works together. The first exhibition took place in 1958 at the Galleria Pater in Milan, followed by other presentations in Rome, Milan and Lausanne. The group broke out in December of 1959 when was published Azimuth magazine. Since then, Bonalumi began to elaborate his own style, so-called painting-objects.
The same year, the artist had his first exhibition abroad, in Rotterdam. In 1960, Bonalumi participated at the foundation of the New European School group in Lausanne and demonstrated his artworks in London, at his next solo show called “Agostino Bonalumi. Recent Paintings, Sculptures and Drawings”.
By the middle of 1960, the artist’s style took shape and in 1964, Agostino signed his first contract with Arturo Schwarz according to which he had to exhibit his paintings at Schwarz’s gallery. Such first exhibition was organized by the collector the same year.
Since then, Agostino Bonalumi started to present his paintings at the most prestigious galleries, art events and groups, among which were the Venice Biennale (1966), Weiss auf Weiss, the ninth Bienal de Sào Paulo (1967), and Zero movement (Zero exhibition in London in 1964 and ZERO Avantgarde at the studio of Lucio Fontana in Milan the following year). The same period was marked by the meeting with Renato Cardazzo who became his sole agent until 1973. Later, in 1974, Cardazzo controlled the publication of a monograph on the artist created by Gillo Dorfles.
Then, the artist travelled through northern Africa and America where he pursued his self-training. Bonalumi had his first personal New York exhibition called Agostino Bonalumi, Painting–Constructions at the Galeria Bonino in 1967. The same year, came his first environmental work, Blu abitabile, followed by the series of the similar paintings and sculptures demonstrated in 1968 at the Museum Ostwall in Dortmund, then, two years later at his second Venice Bienale in a personal room, then at the “Pittura Ambiente” exhibition organized by Francesca Alinovi and Renato Barilli in the Palazzo Reale in Milan (From Yellow to White and from White to Yellow series). In 1968, the artist was invited at the Paris Biennale.
At the beginning of the 1970s, Agostino Bonalumi continued to work on his environmental series and started his new "grid" cycle which had lasted till 1989. At the same period, appeared his first poetry collection published in 1986 for the first time. The artist also tried his hand in a set and costume design for two contemporary ballets, the Partita ballet at the Teatro Romano in Verona in 1970, and Rot at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome in 1972. The exhibitions at which Bonalumi took part this time, were his retrospective in 1974 curated by Giulio Carlo Argan and the show at Palazzo del Te, Mantua in 1980. In 1976, the artist signed the agreement with Galleria Blu presided by Luca Palazzoli.
Bonalumi's creations of the next ten years were related with the use of Steel tube structure which allowed the artist to make almost gestural extroflections. He also reworked his previous sculptures with cast bronze, fibreglass and PVC. These artworks were demonstrated in various galleries, including Fumagalli in Bergamo and Niccoli in Parma and the Institut Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt in 2003. Other series of his environmental artworks called White Environment – Detained Space and Invaded Space were created in 2002 for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice as part of the “Temi e Variazioni” project.
Despite his painting activity and set design projects, Bonalumis worked on the artist’s books, Belluno, for Edizioni Colophon. The volume was composed from his own writings combined with the ones by Petrarca, Villa and Goethe.
The works with the Steel tube technique of the last Agostino Bonalumi’s artistic period which he spent at his studio in Milan became more geometric.
At the end of his artistic career, Bonalumi collaborated with such galleries as Mazzoleni in Turin and Robilant+Voena in London which increased his big popularity. This collaboration resulted in the exhibitions in Brussels, Singapore, Moscow and New York.
One of the major solo shows of Agostino Bonalumi was organized on 4 October, 2013, a month after the artist’s death.
Quotations:
"Beauty has to be experienced, not described."
"Every work for me is already a thought of a certain colour: one can say it is already coloured."
"My generation lived through the academy of the Arte Informel, when it was triumphant, and at a certain point that expressiveness which was purely appearance and not form, was not enough.'
Connections
Agostino Bonalumi married Giuliana Oliva in 1961. The couple had two sons. First of them, named Fabrizio, was born in 1962, the second, Pierenrico, came five years later.