
Angeli vitaminici
1967
Angeli vitaminici presents a boldly conceived still life in which the boundary between painting and object dissolves with playful intelligence. Against a vivid ground of green and yellow, Pozzati arranges a circular green platform, rendered in flat acrylic tones that recall both the decorative language of commercial printing and the formal economy of Pop Art. Onto this painted surface he affixes actual plastic vegetables, including bell peppers, chili peppers, and tomatoes rendered in glossy greens and a single luminous yellow, their physical presence casting real shadows that interact with the painted shadows beneath them. This doubling of illusion and reality, of the depicted and the tangible, sits at the heart of the work's conceptual wit. The patterned fabric backdrop, dense with yellow biomorphic forms on green, intensifies the chromatic energy of the composition while evoking a decorative tradition the artist simultaneously honors and subverts. Pozzati was a central figure in the Italian Pop movement that emerged in Bologna during the 1960s, and this work exemplifies his particular approach to the genre. Where American Pop drew heavily from advertising and mass media imagery, Pozzati gravitated toward a more sensory and Mediterranean register, finding his subject matter in food, the body, and the rhythms of everyday domestic life. The plastic vegetables here are not merely readymade objects but carefully chosen signs, mass-produced simulacra of natural abundance that comment on consumerism, artifice, and the strange beauty of the synthetic. The title, which translates roughly as Vitaminic Angels, adds a layer of gentle irony, elevating humble produce to a kind of celestial status while grounding the sacred in the supermarket. For collectors, the work occupies an important position within Pozzati's output of the mid to late 1960s, a period widely regarded as his most inventive and resolved. The combination of painting and three-dimensional elements places it within a broader European conversation about the expanded possibilities of the canvas, connecting it to the work of contemporaries including Enrico Baj and Mimmo Rotella, while retaining a distinctive lightness and chromatic warmth that is entirely Pozzati's own. The work is in strong condition, retaining its original vivacity of color, and presents an accessible yet intellectually substantial entry point into one of the defining sensibilities of postwar Italian art.
- Medium
- Painting and plastic elements on canvas
🔨 Auction Lot
Martini Studio d'Arte: Modern And Contemporary Art
June 10, 2026
Estimate: €3,000 to €4,000
Lot 230
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