Vincenzo Agnetti (1926)
Italy

"After graduating from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Agnetti studied dramaturgy at the Piccolo Teatro school in Milan. His first paintings date from the late 1940s and were mainly influenced by the Informel movement during the following decade. During this period, Agnetti mixed informal painting with critical, essayistic and theoretical activity.

Although the characteristic expressive impact of this movement corresponded to his own quest for immediacy, Agnetti quickly became interested in the challenge of painting's supposed attainment of a state of plenitude. From then on, he focused on language and got closer to Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, with whom he founded the Azimut gallery. He also wrote articles in the eponymous Azimuth magazine supporting the most radical artistic trends of the time.

In 1962, Agnetti decided to distance himself, both intellectually and geographically, and voluntarily decided to get lost and disappear from the world for a certain time: he left for South America, the Arctic and Arabia, a phase that he himself defines as “arte-no”. During this period, he rejected the practice of painting to identify art with absence by operating in an extremely radical, sometimes cryptic, conceptual context.

On his return to Italy in 1967, he supported artistic practice as a pure analysis of concepts and reconnected with the Milanese artistic scene, quickly publishing "Obsoleto", an "anti-novel" that he had written between 1963 and 1965, in which he deconstructs the logical structures of narration, syntax and grammar. His first personal exhibition took place the same year at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, where he presented “Principia”, one of his works of “permutable logic”. The following year, he exhibited his “Drugged Machine” at Cenobio Visualità, an Olivetti Divisumma 14 calculator, whose 10 digits were replaced by letters of the alphabet. In 1970, he created the “NEG”, in collaboration with Brionvega. This work is emblematic of Agnetti's work, the artist uses musical pauses and micro-intervals which separate the sounds coming from a record player, that is to say the perception of silence, which he calls suono bianco (white sound).

His studies on language continued, in 1971 he exhibited his “Feltri” and “Bacheliti” at the Galleria Blu in Milan. At the beginning of the seventies, he also participated in numerous discussions with his friends who had always supported his work, such as the gallerist Castelli, Daniela Palazzoli, Pierre Restany and Achille Bonito Oliva. He also collaborates with contemporary artists such as Gianni Colombo, Claudio Parmiggiani, Paolo Scheggi. In 1973, he exhibited his important installation “Project for a Political Hamlet,” which he defined as static theater. The same year, he opened a studio in New York, where he lived intermittently, traveling back and forth to Milan.

In 1975, he began working with Robert Feldman – in his gallery he held his first American exhibition “Image of an Exhibition” where he met his friend Shusaku Arakawa. In 1977 he exhibited at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and wrote a book of poetry entitled “Machiavelli 30”. In 1980, he was at the Galleria Toselli in Milan where he presented “Surplace”, a sculpture exhibition, and in New York, at Feldman.

In his latest works, entitled “Photography of 79-81”, poetry encompasses style: Agnetti intervenes on photographic paper exposed to light and treated. He scratches this support to recover the figurative element, the drawing as a conceptual operation.

His last exhibition took place at the Galleria Bruna Soletti in 1981, the year of Agnetti's sudden death."

(Source, website, Tornabuoni Art)
(Biography by the artist himself : website)

Works :

• Vobulazione e bieloquenza NEG (1970)
• Documentario n°2 (1973)