
Costellazioni
1984
Costellazioni presents a field of pale blue figures suspended across an off-white canvas, each rendered through meticulous stippling and delicate linear marks that hover at the threshold of legibility. The figures, which suggest human forms in motion, appear to drift and rotate freely across the picture plane, unanchored by gravity or horizon. Their near-dissolution into the ground of the canvas creates a sense of emergence and recession simultaneously, as though the marks are being born out of the surface or slowly returning to it. The dot-based technique, applied with extraordinary patience and precision, generates a luminous atmospheric quality that is both clinical and deeply poetic, consistent with Dadamaino's lifelong investigation into the relationship between mark, surface, and perception. Eduarda Emilia Maino, known as Dadamaino, was a central figure in the Italian avant-garde, associated with the Azimuth group alongside Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani in the early 1960s before forging an increasingly independent and rigorous practice across subsequent decades. By the 1980s, her work had moved toward extended serial investigations of the sign and the body, exploring how repeated marks could generate rhythm, meaning, and visual energy across large expanses. The Costellazioni series takes its title from constellations, and the reference is apt in ways that extend beyond the visual arrangement of scattered forms. Like stars read as mythological figures through an act of collective imagination, Dadamaino's stippled bodies require the viewer's participation to fully cohere, inviting an active process of projection and recognition that places perception itself at the center of the work. This particular work, executed in ink on canvas at a modest and intimate scale, demonstrates the full sophistication of her mature practice within a format that rewards close, sustained looking. The restraint of the palette, limiting itself to a single cool blue against white, intensifies the sensitivity of every mark and amplifies the spatial tension between figure and ground. For collectors, Costellazioni represents a rare opportunity to acquire a work from a defining period of Dadamaino's career, one that encapsulates her commitment to conceptual rigor, her grounding in the European Zero and kinetic traditions, and her distinctly humanist instinct to return, again and again, to the form of the body as a site of inquiry.
- Medium
- Ink on canvas
🔨 Auction Lot
Martini Studio d'Arte: Modern And Contemporary Art
June 10, 2026
Estimate: €3,000 to €4,000
Lot 26
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