Giacomo Balla, Il Paravento (the screen)

Balla is an inventor, a magician and a prophet: one of the protagonists of the Italian and international culture of the 20th century. He compares himself to Leonardo and Titian. He insults the passatists in the limelight of his time. Balla is unable to give up research, even if it is polite: "After having worked, the artist must feel tired, excited, sometimes happy and almost always dissatisfied".

Each of his works is experimentation. Each piece of paper can contain the idea of ​​a painting, just as a simple sketch can predict an architecture. Because everything, in its exhausting laboriousness, is not and does not want to be a realization but a Project.

The present Screen reflects Balla's transition from his kinetic and analytical phase to the concept of complete abstraction in which he reduced light, speed and dynamic movement into a synthesis of line and color. His attention had shifted from the moving object to the essence of the movement itself, and the dynamic sensation of speed became an autonomous entity, not to mention the main subject of his work. This Balla two-door painted screen is one of the very few painted screens that Balla is known to have created in one of its main historical and artistic moments.

GIACOMO BALLA
(Torino 1871 - Roma 1958)

PARAVENTO
1916-1917

Due ante dipinte su entrambi i lati

olio su tavola, 124 x 115,5 cm

Firmato fronte e retro in basso a sinistra: Balla