Vincenzo Agnetti Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Milan, 1926 - 1981

After graduating from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Agnetti studied acting at the Piccolo Teatro school in Milan. His first paintings date back to the late 1940s and were largely influenced by the informal movements of the following decade. Read the full biography

Vincenzo Agnetti Biography

Milan, 1926 - 1981

After graduating from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Agnetti studied acting at the Piccolo Teatro school in Milan. His first paintings date back to the late 1940s and were largely influenced by the informal movements of the following decade. During this period Agnetti combined informal painting with critical, essayistic and theoretical activities.

Although the movement's distinctive expressive influence corresponded to its quest for immediacy, Agnetti soon became interested in the challenge of achieving so-called totality through painting. Since then he has concentrated on language and developed relationships with Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, with whom he founded the Azimut Gallery. He also published articles in the magazine of the same name, Azimuth, in support of the most radical artistic movement of the time.

In 1962 Agnetti decided to distance himself intellectually and geographically from Western society, voluntarily leaving the world for a period of time, traveling to South America, the Arctic and Arabia, a phase that he himself defined as "artistic nothingness". In this period he refused to use painting to identify art and absence, operating within an extremely radical and sometimes almost mystical conceptual context.

Returning to Italy in 1967, he supported the vision of artistic practice as a pure analysis of concepts and restored contact with the Milanese artistic world, soon publishing the anti-fiction "Obsoleto", written between 1963 and 1965, in which he deconstructed logic Structural narrative, syntax and grammar. In the same year his first solo exhibition was held at Palazzo Diamanti in Ferrara, where he presented "Principia", one of his works "Switchable Logic". The following year he exhibited his "Drugged Machine" at the Cenobio Visualità gallery, an Olivetti Divisumma 14 calculator in which ten digits have been replaced by letters. In 1970 he created "NEG" in collaboration with Brionvega. This piece is emblematic of Agnetti's work, in which the artist uses musical pauses and microintervals to separate the sound from the turntable, creating a sense of silence that he calls "white sound".

In the following years the artist continued his linguistic studies and in 1971 he exhibited the works "Feltri" and "Bacheliti" at the Galleria Blu in Milan. In the early Seventies he also had numerous conversations with the gallery owners Castelli, Daniela Palazzoli, Pierre Restany and Achille Bonito Oliva, who had always supported his work. He has also collaborated with contemporary artists such as Gianni Colombo, Claudio Parmiggiani and Paolo Scheggi. In 1973 he exhibited his important installation "The Political Hamlet Project", which he defined as static theatre. In the same year he opened a studio in New York, where he lived intermittently, traveling to and from Milan.

In 1975 he began to work with Robert Feldman - in his gallery he held his first American exhibition "Images of the Exhibition", where he met the exhibition of his friend Arakawa. In 1977 he exhibited at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and wrote a collection of poems entitled Machiavelli 30. In 1980 he held a sculpture exhibition "Surplace" at the Toselli Gallery in Milan before moving to Feldman in New York.

In his latest work, "Photography in '79-81", poetry embraces style. Agnetti works on exposed and treated photographic paper, scraping supports to restore figurative elements, transforming paintings into conceptual manipulations.

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