Giuseppe Spagnulo

1936, Grottaglie (Taranto), Italy - 2016, Milan, Italy

Giuseppe Spagnulo was one of the most radical and powerful sculptors of Italian contemporary art in the second half of the twentieth century. Trained in Faenza and later in Milan, his practice is rooted in archaic matter, in earth, iron and fire. From the 1970s onward, he left his mark on the European sculptural landscape with monumental, primordial works, characterised by a telluric energy and an intense formal tension.

His language is made of gestures carved into metal, of compressive and liberating forces, of thicknesses and fissures evoking the memory of the earth and of time. His works, exhibited in prestigious institutions and public spaces, are true material bodies, capable of engaging with architecture and space in a dimension that is at once physical and symbolic.

Giuseppe Spagnulo

Sole Nero, mixed media on panel, 2011
110x70 cm

Sole Nero (Black Sun) is one of the most intense expressions of Giuseppe Spagnulo's poetics, in which matter and gesture merge into an image dense with symbolism. At the centre of the dark, dense surface, a circular sculptural form emerges, broken and scratched, through which incandescent red glimmers seep out: a wound, a fissure, a spiritual volcano.
The work evokes a buried, compressed energy, ready to explode. Black here is not absence but cosmic depth. The sun, usually a symbol of light, becomes here dark and enigmatic, the source of an inner fire.
Spagnulo works with matter like an alchemist: he heightens its density, turning it into visual tension. Sole Nero is a tragic, primordial icon, speaking of catastrophe and rebirth, of violence and regeneration.
In his vision, contemporary art is a field of forces, a place where matter not only reveals itself, but speaks, cries out, vibrates.