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Provenance: Private Collection, Switzerland.
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Exhibited: Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Roma 1950-59. Il rinnovamento della pittura in Italia, November 1995-February 1996.
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Literature: Archivio Afro (ed.), Afro Catalogo generale ragionato, Rome 1997, no. 361 (illustrated in colour, p. 162).
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Notes: VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium
Painted in 1956, Crepuscolo d'estateis one of the first of Afro's mature works which demonstrate the artist's painting emerging from under the influence of the others and forging a unique and dymanic style all of its own.
This new and unique abstract style of painting derived from a wide variety of sources and influences. Afro was one of the first Italian painters to fully absorb Abstract Expressionism and to incorporate its influence into his work. As a result, his art forms an important link between the American and Italian avant-garde of the 1950s. Afro was the first Italian artist to forge direct contact with the artists of the New York school and during the 1950s he developed particularly close friendship with Willem de Kooning. Both artists shared a heavy debt to the pioneering abstract morphology of de Kooning's friend and mentor Arshile Gorky and it was the basic pictorial logic of Gorky's art that came to underpin much of the development of both painters' increasingly abstract work throughout the 1950s.
Emerging from the twin influences of Gorky and Picasso, between 1956 and 1957 Afro devised a new painterly method that expanded the emotional morphology of Gorky and the tachiste sense of surface of the Informel movement in Europe into a new hybrid of abstract form, colour and gesture. While still rooted in the objective world of figuration, Afro developed in these new paintings an essentially abstract and 'pure' form of painting in which a unique sense of the freedom of painterly gesture and expression immediately came to the fore. Colour, form, and brushstroke were merged into tight abstract structures that, though seemingly non-objective, seemed to embody and reflect the physical properties of the 'real' world.
