Emilio Vedova valuation
Venetian painter of violent black and white abstraction, and of the Plurimi, hinged paintings that stand in the room.
Emilio Vedova (1919–2006) was born in Venice, the son of a house painter, and was largely self-taught, learning to draw from the city's churches and above all from Tintoretto.
What a work by Emilio Vedova is worth
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Bio
Emilio Vedova (1919–2006) was born in Venice, the son of a house painter, and was largely self-taught, learning to draw from the city's churches and above all from Tintoretto. He joined the anti-fascist Corrente group in Milan in 1942 and fought with the Resistance, co-signed the manifesto Oltre Guernica in 1946 and helped found the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti the following year. In the 1950s he became one of the leading Italian painters of Informel, with large canvases of slashed, swept black and white that he meant as a political response to his time, and in 1952 he was one of the Gruppo degli Otto shown at the Venice Biennale. From 1961 he made the Plurimi, painted panels hinged together into structures that stand in space. He designed sets for Luigi Nono's opera Intolleranza 1960, spent 1963 to 1965 in Berlin with the DAAD, taught at the Salzburg summer academy and the Venice academy, and won the Biennale prize for Italian painting in 1960 and its Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in 1997.
Paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Plurimi and the large late works are the core of his market, and works on paper, drawings and prints come up more often. The Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova in Venice, set up by the artist and his wife, keeps his archive, and its record of a work is what buyers ask for. His paint is thick and broadly applied on canvas, paper and board, so cracking, flaking and old restoration need checking, and the Plurimi, with their hinges and painted reverses, need careful handling.
Venice, Corrente and documenta
He was the Italian representative at the first documenta in Kassel in 1955 and showed there again in 1959, 1964 and 1982. His first solo exhibition in the United States was in New York in 1951.
Later exhibitions include the Centre Pompidou-Metz and the Palazzo Reale in Milan, both in 2019.
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