This year, Cologne’s Galerie Karsten Greve has set a record for the largest booth at Art Cologne, with a whopping 220 square meters of exhibition space. Quality hasn’t suffered for size, with the booth featuring a gallery-scale exhibition of Robert Polidori on its exterior and Louise Bourgeois’s 1962 bronze “Inner Ear” inside, in addition to works by several other notable figures. A three-by-seven meter Jannis Kounellis wall sculpture from 2004 is also likely to garner interest, as are “Bloodydrivetrain” by John Chamberlain, 2007, and Pierre Soulages’s “Peinture 157 x 157 cm, 22 Janvier 2012.”
At the gallery itself (Drususgasse 1-5), an expansive overview of the Italian sculptor Fausto Melotti’s oeuvre is on display through June 22. The works range from Melotti’s famous sculptures and terracotta teatrini (small theaters) to lesser-known works on paper and terracotta bassorilievi (sculpted wall objects). Melotti (1901-1986) was 27 before he set foot in Milan’s Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera as a student. Born to a family of musicians, he was a classically trained pianist, particularly drawn to the exacting nature of Bach’s music. This affinity for precision carried over to his academic work, which focused on physics, mathematics and architecture. In turning to art, Melotti directed the same attention to detail to a practice of rigorous abstraction, which he felt might spark a second renaissance in his home country in the years before World War II.
“His works are strongly related to his passion for music, theater and opera,” said Karsten Greve, the gallery’s owner. Greve organized the show, which puts particular emphasis on the ’50s and ’60s, a time when the artist was breaking onto the international stage after his early work had been snapped up by Italian collectors. Often compared to his classmate Lucio Fontana, who was a close personal friend, Melotti sought to create a purity of form in each of his sculptures.
“He had his own ways of exploring this concept,” Greve said, referring to the delicate “spatial transparency” of brass sculptures like “Margherita e i gioielli,” 1979 and “La Camicia di Archimede,” 1983. Such pieces often seem as if they’ve been reduced down to schematics of their initial forms.
The inclusion of many works on paper and terracotta bassorilievi, meanwhile, allows for a still deeper appreciation of Melotti’s process of simplification. The forceful lines of his sculptural diagrams are apparent in both the two-dimensional abstractions and the relief work, virtually popping out of their surfaces.