The USA painter Mark Tobey was a passionate traveller who visited Mexico, Europe, Palestine, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, China and Japan.
Born in 1890 in Centerville, Wisconsin, Tobey lived for most of his life in the US before moving to Basel, Switzerland in the early 1960s.
Tobey's paintings, marked by oriental brushwork and calligraphic strokes, were arguably an influence on Jackson Pollock's paintings. Untitled (1937) is a typical example of Tobey’s pioneering technique from the 1930s.

THE 1950s

In 1928, Fausto Melotti enrolled at Accademia di Brera in Milan to study sculpture. It was here that he met Lucio Fontana and an enduring friendship was formed.
In 1929, Melotti started a 20-year-long collaboration with renown porcelain manufacture Richard-Ginori, for which he created numerous ceramic items, designed by then artistic director Gio Ponti. Since it was produced in the 1950s, Table base has remained in the same family, gifted to them by the artist.
To date, it is the largest known version of any table by Melotti to come to auction, combining his artistic, artisan and design skills.

In 1937, Lucio Fontana spent some time in Paris, studying at the Sèvres porcelain workshop, becoming friends with fellow artists including Constantin Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, and Joan Miró. Executed some 20 years later in 1957, Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale evokes the artist’s typical ‘Spatialism’: his exploration of space and infinity saw him develop a unique pictorial language, prompted by the international Space Race that began when the Sputnik was the first satellite launched into orbit by the USSR.

THE 1970s

Maria Lai was drawn to the customs and history of her homeland Sardinia, and in particular to the lives and voices of the local women. She transformed sewing into a purely artistic action, playing with the techniques and gestures of this time-honoured craft to create poetically conceptual artworks that marry the past with the present, tradition with innovation, and the visible with the invisible. In Foglio 70, indecipherable messages dance across the fabric, like a secret alphabet. Alongside the rhythmical lines of flowing ‘text’, the story remains untold and unrecorded.

THE 1980s

In 1980 Cindy Sherman switched from black-and-white to colour photography, and to clearly larger formats, seen in her series titled ‘Rear Screen Projections’.
In 1983, she created Untitled No 120 A as part of her series Fashion, which was commissioned by a New York fashion house for Interview magazine.
These photographs exude an ethereal, almost-sinister air, breaking with the conventions associated with fashion photography. Using fashion-advertising as a medium, Sherman raises questions about clothing as a ‘second skin’ and sign of identity.

THE 2000s

Paola Pivi combines the familiar with the unknown by using identifiable objects which are then modified to introduce renewed scale and context. These devices allow her to challenge her audience to change their point of view. Animals are often used as protagonists in these scenes. Pivi draws upon their perceived characteristics and instils them with human mannerisms. In Untitled (2003) the viewer is confronted with two ostriches sitting in a boat within a realistic landscape setting.

THE 1930s