DADAMAINO (EMILIA EDUARDA MAINO)

With the confirmation of authenticity by Archivio Dadamaino, Milan, 22 June 2011. The artwork is recorded there under the archive number: 286/11.
Also with the confirmation of authenticity by Associazione Amici di Dadamaino, Somma Lombardo. This work is recorded there under the archive number: 170307.

Provenance: Private collection Ticino.

"Dada Maino has overcome the ‘problem of painting’: different parameters inform her work: her paintings are the flags of a new world, they are a new meaning: they are not content with ‘saying something different’: they also say something new”, wrote Piero Manzoni in 1961, a statement which fittingly describes the work presented here: the automatic passage of time, the coming and going of things, the discovery and emergence of new things which surround us.

In the 1950s and 60s the world was in upheaval and, even within art, artists were questioning its traditional concepts. Lucio Fontana was the one who, with a simple slash of the canvas, broke with centuries of artistic tradition, and enabled future generations to experience an unbelievable freedom in their thinking and to put it into practice. This new generation of the avant-garde, indebted to Fontana, who demanded and implemented a radical revision of ideas, included Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani and Dadamaino.
These ideas, which were radical for the times, were taken to heart by Eduarda Emilia Maino, known as Dadamaino, who in her first series of works, “Volumi”, cut round or oval forms in the canvas. The influence of Fontana’s “Buchi” (holes) cannot be denied, as she herself said: “I always hated matter and sought immateriality. Of course, Fontana played a decisive role in the history of my painting ... if Fontana had not pierced the canvas, probably I would not have dared to do so either. It totally removed matter to the point of making visible parts of the canvas, to remove any material element, to deprive it of any such rhetoric and return to tabula rasa, in purity.” These works were shown in the same year at her first exhibition at Galleria dei Bossi in Milan. Shortly afterwards she joined Manzoni’s Galerie Azmuth, which was ideally linked to artists in Europe thinking along similar lines: the Zero-Group in Germany with Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, the Nul Group in the Netherlands with Jan Schoonhoven, and the Motus Group in France.

In parallel with her participation in these artist groups, she also pursued her own sculptural research in the course of her artistic career. Some series of her Oeuvre are excellent examples for the trajectory of her different ideas: the room filling "Volumi" (1958-60), the cinetic artworks "Lumino" or the experimental Op-Art items with the serie "Oggetti ottico-dinamici (1961-65).

“Lavoravo su tutto quello che poi potevo appendere. Il movimento delle cose mi ha fatto guadagnare lo spazio, ho in qualche modo conquistato lo spazio, un attraversamento anche grazie al materiale”. (quote Barbero, Luca Massimo, in: “Dadamaino. Un’intervista tra vita e pensieri…”, p. 34.) For her series "Movimenti delle cose" Dadamaino chose transparent polyester foil in order to play with spatiality. Depth and volume are expressed through flowing line drawings, which imitate drapery, accentuated by the white-painted stretcher, which emphasises the distance from the wall and thereby allows the light to feed through the work.

In a unique way Dadamaino conquers three-dimensionality thanks to the interplay of light and matter.