Amedeo Martegani Uomini di spalla

cm 90 x 70

Amedeo Martegani began his career in Milan in 1985 when he participated in a group show organized in the old Brown Boveri factory, an alternative space of primary importance for emerging artists in the city during the 1980s. Like other artists of his generation, he adopted multiple languages from the start, a practice that critic Elio Grazioli described as intellectual and expressive nomadism. As he has often declared in his interviews, the artist is not interested in a specific language, but rather in a stimulus, a starting point or an idea suggested by either the artistic sphere or that of daily life. For Martegani, the elaboration of a work of art does notbegin with the choice of the idiom, but rather with ideas and stimuli that have formed during encounters with diverse alphabets and materials (painting, photography, video, books and furnishings) or through collaboration with other artists and intellectuals. Martegani’s work is therefore not characterized by a hierarchy in the choice of disciplines and the materials of reference, nor in the choice of recurrent subjects. Its continuity consists of a frank and open-minded attitude, ready for exchange and the unforeseen, with a special penchant for all that is unexpected and jests with reality and its representation. Uomini di spalla is an example of this attitude. The work is one of a series painted during the first half of the 1990s and documents the artist’s interest in ambiguous images situated on the borders of various disciplines, allowing him to explore the boundaries between painting and photography, sculpture and drawing, abstract and figurative. The man in the foreground, portrayed from behind and surrounded by an evanescent atmosphere, is an oil painting, but seems to have been captured in a delicate black and white photograph.

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Esproprio [expropriation]: Vincenzo Cabiati, Amedeo Martegani, Bernhard Rüdiger, Adriano Trovato, exhibition catalogue (Milan, Galleria Giò Marconi), Milan 1991. A. Barzel, L. Grazioli (eds.), Una scena emergente: artisti italiani contemporanei (An emerging scene: Contemporary Italian Artists), exhibition catalogue (Prato, Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci), Prato 1991. G. Di Pietrantonio, J. Hoet (eds.), Arte all’arte: Gilberto Zorio, Sol LeWitt, Jessica Diamond, Amedeo Martegani, Marco Cingolani, Salvo, Anish Kapoor, exhibition catalogue (San Gimignano, Galleria Continua), Siena 1997.

Foto Roberto Galasso

Donation by Claudia Gian Ferrari

Painting