Remo Bianco
Collage - Senza titolo, 1959
Collage, mixed media on paper, on canvas
29 1/2 x 19 5/8 inches (74.93 × 49.85 cm)

Courtesy of Fondazione Remo Bianco, Milan

Selected by Laura Hoptman

Remo Bianco (Milan, June 3, 1922–Milan, February 23, 1988) began his artistic training in 1937, attending evening drawing classes at the Brera Academy. After serving in the Italian Navy during World War II, he returned to Milan, where postwar reconstruction was bringing rapid social and cultural change. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, he engaged with experimental practices associated with Spatialism and Nuclear Art. At the time, artists were challenging conventional boundaries between traditional artistic disciplines and exploring new relationships between the image and physical space. Bianco developed a particular interest in material and surface. These concerns led to the Impronte and 3D works, in which he experimented with marks and forms on different surfaces and planes, creating layered, fragmented, and displaced compositions.

Following a trip to the United States, Bianco began developing his Collages in 1955. He first exhibited the series at the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice in 1959. Bianco worked with canvas, paper, and fabric to create fields of gestural marks, which he then cut into predominantly quadrangular fragments and recomposed according to geometric structures. He disrupted the original image through the act of cutting, allowing fragmentation to become a method of constructing a new composition. This process created a tension between spontaneous gesture and deliberate arrangement. The physicality of the mark and the act of cutting became integral to the work, introducing movement and interruption into the composition. By cutting and reassembling the painted surface, Bianco transformed the original gestural image into a process of fragmentation and reconstruction, allowing its constituent elements to be continually reorganized rather than remain fixed.