Emilio Vedova (Venice 1919 - Venice 2006)

Emilio Vedova was born in Venice in 1919. He turned precociously to painting and drawing, taking Tintoretto as his first “maestro,” a choice that revealed what would be a constant in his life as an artist, the construction of spaces vibrant with powerful expressive tension. In the first years of the war he connected with the Milan Corrente milieu, and together with his comrades (Birolli, Guttuso and others) developed a radical anti-Fascist stance that would lead him to join the partisan formations in the mountains above Belluno. After the war he joined first the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti and then the Group of Eight; he would be the first to leave the latter, in 1953. He embarked upon a solitary course, constantly inspired by a bitter, uncompromising, screaming intolerance and rebellion against the violence of man upon man, under whatever banner.
In 1951 he exhibited in New York, and from the mid-1950s widely also in Europe (always gaining special attention in the German and central European world), the United States and Latin America. He participated in the first Documenta of Kassel and in many editions of the Venice Biennale. In 1960, with his Plurimi, complex plastic works in wood, cardboard and iron, saturated with incendiary painting, he began the adventurous “off-the-wall” creations that would mark so much of the rest of his career, which would nevertheless remain always bound up with the act of painting.
Emilio Vedova died in his native Venice in 2006.