Enrico Baj (1924-2003) - Generale

Enrico Baj was born in Milan on October 31, 1924. After completing his studies at the Brera Academy, in 1951 he promoted, together with Sergio Dangelo and Gianni Dova, the Movimento Arte Nucleare and held in his hometown his first solo exhibition at the Galleria San Fedele. In 1953 he met Asger Jorn, with whom he founded the International Movement for an Imagist Bauhaus, taking a stand against the forced rationalization and geometrization of art. The following year he organized the International Ceramics Meetings in Albisola, in Liguria.
In his artistic research, which is expressed through polymaterial and polychromatic collages, there are two strands: on the one hand a playful line, where the pleasure of painting with any kind of material prevails, and on the other a strong civil commitment and a critique of contemporaneity, which is expressed in the Generals and in the military Parades of the sixties, and even more in the works of the seventies, such as The Funeral of the Anarchist Pinelli (1972) and the Apocalypse (1979). In the eighties, temporarily abandoning collage, he realizes the Metamorphoses and Metaphors series (1988), in which he develops a figurative representation of the imaginary and the fantastical. In 1993 he began the cycle of tribal Masks, assemblages made with scraps of modern civilization to create ironic