Agenore Fabbri (1911-1998) - Cane nel labirinto

Lithograph on paper in 9 colors - Hand-signed artwork at the bottom right and numbered at the bottom left - 50x70 cm - Year 1985 - Limited edition - copy to be shipped with a guarantee certificate 26/100 - without frame - excellent condition - private collection - purchased and originating from Italy - shipping via UPS, SDA, DHL, TNT, BRT
Biography
Agenore Fabbri (Quarrata, 1911 – Savona, 1998) was an Italian sculptor and painter. At the age of 12, he enrolled at the School of Arts and Crafts in Pistoia and was later admitted to the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, a city where he immersed himself in the cultural scene of the Caffè Le Giubbe Rosse, a gathering place for the hermetic poets (Eugenio Montale, Carlo Bo, and others). Here, he came into contact with painter Ottone Rosai and poet Mario Luzi. In 1930, he began modeling and firing clay, and five years later, he moved to Albisola, initially working as a model maker at the ceramic factory La Fiamma. He continued his apprenticeship and started creating works featuring human and animal figures with a strong expressionist charge, incorporating color and new techniques such as 'reflection' in terracotta. Also in Albisola, where the leading figures of the second futurism still under Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's guidance worked, he later set up a small studio and first connected with Arturo Martini and then with Lucio Fontana, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship. In 1938, he achieved moderate success at the National Exhibition in Naples, and in the early 1940s, he held solo exhibitions in Milan, Bergamo, and Savona, but then had to pause his activity to serve in the military in Yugoslavia. From 1946, he settled permanently in Milan, while during the summer months, he continued working in Albisola, which after the war became an internationally renowned location, attracting artists like Marino Marini, Giacomo Manzù, Aligi Sassu, members of the CoBrA group such as Karel Appel, Guillame Corneille, and Asger Jorn, Roberto Matta, Wilfredo Lam, and later Giuseppe Capogrossi, Roberto Crippa, Emilio Scanavino, and the young prodigy Piero Manzoni. In 1947, important works in ceramics and terracotta were created, such as Donna del popolo (a title spontaneously suggested by Picasso), Uomo colpito, and La madre, all produced at the Mazzotti factory owned by the artist and futurist poet Tullio d'Albisola, with whom he organized his first meeting with Picasso in Vallauris. In 1956, with Aligi Sassu, Giulio Turcato, Tettamanti, Zancanaro, and Antonietta Raffaella Mafai, he traveled for over three months in China, where he had the opportunity to show some of his works in Beijing and other cities. Subsequently, he exhibited solo shows in the USA in New York and Philadelphia, and in Europe in London, Paris, Stockholm, Rome, and Milan. He participated in major national and international sculpture exhibitions: the Venice Biennials of 1952 and 1960 (both with solo rooms), as well as those of 1959 and 1964, and numerous editions of the Quadriennale di Roma, along with exhibitions in Antwerp, Madrid, Paris, Zurich, Athens, The Hague, Munich, London, New York, Boston, Tokyo, São Paulo, Mexico City, Cairo, and Alexandria in Egypt. From the early 1970s, he began frequenting the 'Centro Cultura Arte Contemporanea - Balestrini' in Albissola Marina, where he developed a close friendship with Franco Balestrini. Balestrini organized countless solo exhibitions of Agenore Fabbri's work, becoming one of the greatest connoisseurs of his entire oeuvre and one of the leading collectors. In the 1980s, his work gained particular recognition in Germany, with solo exhibitions at the Wilhelm Lehmbruck-Museum in Duisburg, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, and the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. From 1965, he became a member of the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, of which he was elected president in 1998, the year of his death. He received numerous awards starting from 1939. Among the many honors, we note the International Sculpture Prize of Cannes in 1955, a purchase award at the fifth edition of the Premio Spoleto in 1957, and awards from the Triennale di Milano, where he won the Gold Medal, Grand Prix, and Grand Prix for Ceramics. On August 4, 1998, he was hospitalized for a cerebral hemorrhage at the Savona Hospital, where he died on November 7.
His work is of a narrative genre with evident expressionist features and influenced by popular plasticity, which appears in many works from his native Tuscany. It is well known that terracotta was, for Fabbri at the beginning of his career, a sort of necessary passage: an extremely humble material that allowed him to learn modeling and thus create plastic works without subjecting his artistic action to the tyranny of metal management costs, burdened by the expenses of casting and welding. Immediately after the war, which forever marked his sensibility, his work moved towards an exaggerated expressive dramatism that concerned not only humans but also spread into the animal world, depicted in fights and brawls with effects that go beyond mere violence. Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, Fabbri mastered bronze and wood: with the former, he expressed himself through a convulsive modeling marked by deep grooves on the figure, while with the latter, he employed a technique of breaking and overlapping surfaces, representing his contribution to the Informal Art movement, which, in those years, developed mainly in Europe as an artistic response—abstract and gestural—to the profound moral, political, and ideological crisis caused by the horrors of World War II. During this period, he also created numerous works using iron, tinned and galvanized steel. In the final phase of his work, Fabbri first returned to his expressionist roots and then, from 1981, discovered painting, creating works such as the cycle of the Public Gardens, which are finally dedicated to a more open and heartfelt view of reality and human destiny. This approach became predominant in the 1980s and culminated, in the following decade, in a colorful and playful evocation, also characterized by the use of recycled materials such as sand, stones, fabrics, cans, etc., drawing from his past informal experience. Agenore Fabbri also authored numerous monumental works in Milan (Caccia al cinghiale, 1964, in the garden of the Municipal Library), Pistoia, Savona (Monument to the Resistance in Piazza Martiri della Libertà), and two imposing ceramic bas-reliefs: Battaglia, housed at the Museo 'Manlio Trucco' in Albisola Superiore, and La favola di Orfeo, at the Libero Grassi Technological Center in Quarrata (Pistoia).