MATERIALS: Tempera and collage on paper
DIMENSIONS: 60 × 100 cm
COLLECTION: Unknown
CATALOGUE: C_1959_52
A now-lost work belonging to a core group of paintings and drawings – mostly made in 1959 – in which, after his first Schermi (Screens), Mauri brought another great mass-communication medium, the comic strip, into the field of painting (inv. 39, 46, 49, 52, 53 etc.). In these paintings, Mauri deconstructs the language of the comic strip, highlighting the medium’s verbal-visual nature, freely juxtaposing pictograms, collage inserts and thought balloons populated by often erased, indecipherable words, frequently including ‘FINE’ and ‘THE END. In these works, Mauri’s painterly intentions are accentuated by the style in which he renders these elements, using quick, gestural brushstrokes; in many places these marks linger like drips, closer to American Abstract Expressionism than to the nascent US Pop art.
Emilio Villa, “Fabio Mauri”, in Appia, no. 2, Rome, January 1960, n.p. (ill.).
Fabio Mauri, exhibition catalogue, Studio d’Arte Toninelli, Rome, edited by Cesare Vivaldi (Rome: Studio d’Arte Toninelli, 1969), p. 20 (ill.).
Amore mio, exhibition catalogue, Palazzo Ricci, Montepulciano (Siena), edited by Achille Bonito Oliva (Florence: Centro Di Edizioni, 1970), n.p. (ill.).
Fabio Mauri. Opere e Azioni 1954-1994, exhibition catalogue, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcella Cossu (Milan / Rome: Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori / Carte Segrete, 1994), p. 21 (ill.).
Fabio Mauri: Male e bellezza – Das Böse und das Schöne, exhibition catalogue, Kunsthalle, Klagenfurt, edited by Arnulf Rohsmann (Klagenfurt, 1997), p. 24 (ill.).
Un atlante di arte nuova. Emilio Villa e l’Appia Antica, exhibition catalogue, Complesso di Campo di Bove, Rome, edited by Nunzio Giustozzi (Milan: Electa, 2021), p. 138 (ill.).
