Giulio Turcato
Signed Forma 1, painted political abstraction, and made surfaces out of foam rubber and sand.
Giulio Turcato was born in Mantua in 1912 and was one of the signatories of Forma 1 in Rome in 1947, the manifesto that argued for abstraction against the realism the Italian left demanded — a position that took some courage from painters who were themselves communists. His work stayed political in subject while remaining abstract in language: Comizi, the meeting paintings, reduce a political rally to a field of red flags. From the 1960s he built physical surfaces from foam rubber, sand, tar and metallic pigment, and made the Superfici lunari. He died in Rome in 1995.
An Italian market with growing international attention as post-war Italian abstraction is reassessed. The Comizi and the works of the late 1940s and 1950s lead. The foam rubber and mixed-material surfaces of the 1960s onwards are the significant conservation problem: polyurethane foam degrades, discolours and crumbles with age, and there is no straightforward remedy, so condition and storage history bear heavily on value. Works on paper and prints are numerous. The Archivio Giulio Turcato in Rome handles attribution.
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