LONDON.- Hauser & Wirth announced its exclusive worldwide representation of the Estate of Fausto Melotti (1901 – 1986), the Italian sculptor, installation artist, and poet admired for his unique contribution to the development of mid-century European Modernism.
Born in Rovereto, Italy, Melotti studied sculpture at the Brera Academy in Milan, where he met lifelong friend Lucio Fontana. Before turning to art, Melotti studied music, mathematics and engineering – disciplines that exerted clear influence upon his distinctive practice across subsequent decades. Often linked with titans of the postwar era, such as Calder, Fontana, and Giacometti, Melotti moved freely among mediums, incorporating plaster, ceramics, metal and fabric into his work. His delicate sculptures often exploited flexible metals – brass, copper and bronze – with fragments of coarse cloth or shimmering gauze, to create structures imbued with an ethereal beauty and inflected with Surrealist mystery. Melotti’s forms appear almost to reverberate with movement in the air, and his signature composite elements of wire, draped fabric, and lithe sheet metal take on an acoustic dimension that has set his oeuvre apart. Behind the seemingly blithe and intuiti ve character of Melotti’s sculptures, however, resides a deep conception of art as a rigorous exercise in order and harmony, based on firm principles of geometry and musical structure.
In representing the Estate, Hauser & Wirth looks forward to further advancing the legacy of Fausto Melotti through exhibitions and public programmes at its gallery spaces internationally, as well as through the development of new publications and research on the artist’s work, and sale of artworks.
‘We are honoured and delighted to work with the Estate of Fausto Melotti’, commented Marc Payot, Partner and Vice President, Hauser & Wirth. ‘We are particularly excited to share his uniquely lyrical and beautiful work, so important within the European Modernist canon, with broader audiences beyond Italy and Europe, in the United States and internationally. Hauser & Wirth’s programme is rooted in the contributions of the pioneers of the postwar era, and Melotti joins Hans Arp and Fabio Mauri within our family of that era’s visionaries whose influence is so important to the evolution of modern and contemporary art.’
