
Untitled
This untitled work by Mario Schifano presents a luminous collision of enamel and chalk on emulsified canvas, mounted beneath perspex, measuring 51 by 71 centimeters. Against a deep teal-black ground, two loosely resolved forms confront one another across the picture plane: a turbulent mass of orange, red, and yellow on the left, built up in layered, gestural strokes that suggest combustion or organic dissolution, and a cooler, more spectral presence on the right rendered in pale lavender, white, and accents of vivid cyan blue. The perspex covering unifies these chromatic zones beneath a single reflective surface, collapsing the boundary between painting and object and introducing the viewer's own environment into the work's visual field. Schifano's technique here is characteristically hybrid. The emulsified canvas absorbs pigment in ways that resist clean contour, allowing colors to bleed and smear into one another while the enamel retains a hard, almost industrial luminosity in passages where it pools and sets. The chalked marks, particularly the blue linear gestures at upper right, read as immediate and provisional against this more fixed substrate, creating a layered temporal effect in which different registers of mark-making appear to have occurred at separate moments. This interplay between permanence and ephemerality is central to Schifano's mature practice, in which the act of painting is treated as an accumulation of events rather than a unified compositional decision. Associated with the Italian Neo-avant-garde and aligned at various points with Arte Povera and Pop sensibilities, Schifano consistently interrogated the mediated image, the painted surface as a kind of screen or transmission. Works of this scale and intimacy, smaller and more privately scaled than his large-format canvases of the 1960s and 1970s, reveal the experimental core of his studio practice. The perspex support, used recurrently across his career, functions both as preservation and as conceptual framing, literalizing the idea of the image as something enclosed, transmitted, and slightly removed from direct contact. For collectors, this work offers an exceptional opportunity to engage with Schifano's sensibility in concentrated form, combining chromatic intensity, material intelligence, and the restless formal curiosity that defines his contribution to postwar Italian art.
- Medium
- Enamel and chalks on emulsified canvas, perspex
🔨 Auction Lot
Martini Studio d'Arte: Modern And Contemporary Art
June 10, 2026
Estimate: €8,000 to €10,000
Lot 48
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