Pino Pascali — Colli di damigella (1965/1966)

Pino Pascali (Bari, 1935 – Rome, 1968) is one of the most original figures of Italian art in the 1960s. In a career of extraordinary brevity he turned everyday materials, natural elements and objects from popular culture into works that question the traditional boundaries between painting, sculpture and installation; irony, play and transformation are central to a language in which common objects lose their function and take on new identities. His research is bound to the season that led to Arte Povera and still occupies a central position in the history of post-war Italian art.

Colli di damigella (1965/1966) belongs to a fundamental phase of that research. The work is assembled from the discs of woven cord traditionally used to protect demijohns of wine, combined until they compose an anthropomorphic figure — an object of material culture withdrawn from its function and turned into a new and surprising presence.

The title carries the irony: Colli di damigella plays on colli di damigiane, so that a minimal displacement of words changes the identity of the object and gives it a figurative, almost narrative dimension. The dimensions — 214 cm in height — amplify the process: modest, functional elements acquire an almost monumental presence, and the repetition of the forms generates a visual rhythm that brings the work close to sculpture while keeping a strict relationship with the surface.

The work has been presented in exhibition contexts devoted to the experimentation of the second half of the twentieth century, including Filoluce at the Museo della Permanente in Milan in 2005, and was included in the exhibition Ironica in Milan as an example of the artist's linguistic play. Pascali's production is extremely circumscribed — he died in 1968 at thirty-two — and that limit is the structural reason for the rarity of his historical works: a condition that keeps the most representative examples, particularly those of 1965 to 1967, at the centre of collector attention.