Beschreibung:

λ ANDREA CASCELLA (ITALIAN 1920-1990)
ABSTRACT HEAD
Black marble
Height: 50cm (19½ in.)
Provenance:
Galleria dell'Ariete, Milan
Acquired from the above by Baroness Rawlings
Born in Pescara in 1920, Andrea Cascella was a third-generation Italian sculptor. Both his Father, Tommaso, and Grandfather, Basilio, were both accomplished artists and began to teach Andrea from an early age. However, Cascella's practice mainly emerged within the wider context of the avant-garde Abstractionist movement.
Fighting in the Italian resistance during the Second World War Cascella and his brother Pietro later travelled to Rome and worked on the restoration of the ceramics and sculptures from ancient Roman Villas. Here, he discovered the burgeoning post-war Italian art scene, exhibiting at the L'Obelisco Gallery.
Cascella's work has a distinct force and structure to it that straddle a historic and modern understanding. On one hand, his use of marble echoes the art of the classical antiquity native to his heritage, whilst on the other, his use of abstract volumes that assemble themselves together to make an image is done with a modernist aesthetic.
This is particularly true of Abstract Head (Lot 49), where the powerful volumes come together to inform the shape of a head with a nose, ears, eyes and mouth. Indeed, Marco Valsecchi writes that, 'beyond the appearance of machines is a suggestion of the human anatomy ... the semblance of the human body appears with a precise insistence, and it is clear that the sculptor has searched for this semblance. ... In this re-creation of ancient vigour, and the realization of the present, lies the spontaneous force of the imagination which has found its forms, whose images are both accomplished and mature.'
Cascella's sculptures, which offered a uniquely ambiguous visual language, earnt him international acclaim, including being joint prize winner with his brother Pietro in the 1958 International competition for the Auschwitz Memorial to the Unknown Political Prisoner and being awarded with the Principal Italian Sculpture Prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale.
(Marco Valsecchi in Andrea Cascella Grovesnor Gallery exhibition catalogue, Graphic Press Limited, London, 1962.)