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.

Dimensions: 48 in. width x 26 in. height x 3 in. depth

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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