Museums in Rome and Berlin are co-hosting a major retrospective of 20th-century avant-garde artist Emilio Vedova the man known as the 'Italian brother' of abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.
Despite humble beginnings in a working-class Venetian family, the self-taught artist's pioneering vision and three-dimensional canvases won him fame both at home and abroad, with exhibitions outside Europe in the United States, Brazil and Canada.
Vedova has also been experiencing posthumous market success since his death last year: his "Triptych of Liberty" (1950) set a record for the artist at Sotheby s Milan in November when it went under the hammer for 618,900 euros.
Around 150 works spanning Vedova's entire career are on display at Rome's Galleria Nazionale d Arte Moderna until January, when they will travel to a sister show at the Berlinische Galerie State Museum for Modern Art.
Arranged chronologically, the exhibition begins with the intricate, spidery ink drawings Vedova made as a 17-year-old inspired by the architecture of Venetian churches such as "S. Agnese" (1936), together with small dense oil paintings created while he spent time in Rome with an uncle in 1937.
A staunch anti-Fascist, Vedova worked for the Resistance during World War II, joining the artistic movement Corrente in Milan alongside Renato Guttuso and subscribing to a life-long philosophy that art is a moral act with a social, transformative value.
After the war he took a more abstract turn, first going through a colourful geometric phase before finding his true artistic footing in the early 1950s with abstract expressionism.
On display here are massive, energised canvases from the "Clash of Circumstances" and "Image of Time" series that dominated the artist's production for a decade.
The next section of the show is dedicated to Vedova's "Multiples", which he began to experiment with in the early 1960s, painting on large, free-standing, angled wooden frames that the viewer could walk into and around.
"They are structurally new paintings, constructed on different levels with a wide variety of visual possibilities," said art critic Giulio Carlo Argan when the "Multiples" were first exhibited in Rome in 1963.
"The images can explode near or far, above your head or under your feet".
The exhibition dedicates a room to Vedova's installation at the Expo world fair held in Montreal in 1967, when he filled the Italian pavilion with a complicated passage of continuously moving light using projectors and a series of Murano glass tiles layered with various metals and materials.
"The spectator is physically involved, hit and wrapped around by the light," Vedova said of "Space/Multiple/Light", which was accompanied by an electronic music soundtrack.
Although the work is not recreated here, the original glass tiles are on show, accompanied by a film documenting their painstaking creation.
A corridor of the gallery focuses on the "Carnival" cycle which Vedova produced in the 1970s and 1980s, inspired by what he saw as the Venice event's "wild, organic and fanciful" spirit and using the classic festival masks in three-dimensional reliefs.
The highlight of the exhibition is a hall filled with his 1980s "Discs" series: vast circular canvases lying on the floor, standing on end and suspended from the walls and ceiling, painted on both sides in black and white with smudges of yellow and green, like planets seen from space but simultaneously within touching distance.
Wrapping up the show is one of the artist's last works, "Who Burns a Book Burns a Man" (1993), his angry reaction to the burning of the National Library in Sarajevo during the Balkan War.
Vedova died in his sleep last October, just one month after the death of his wife Annabianca.
"A very great painter, Venetian in every fibre of his art, in every brushstroke of his work, in every atom of his colour," Venice mayor Massimo Cacciari said, paying tribute to the artist on his death.
Emilio Vedova 1919-2006 runs at the Galleria Nazionale d Arte Moderna in Rome until 6 January 2008.
