Agostino Bonalumi’s 1970 sculpture is heading to Art Basel Unlimited 2026 — and Mazzoleni is using the fair’s museum-scale platform to reframe a work that has rarely been seen publicly.
Presented in collaboration with Archivio Bonalumi, “Struttura modulare bianca” arrives as the gallery marks its 40th anniversary. The sculpture was conceived in 1970 and made for Bonalumi’s solo room at the 35th Venice Biennale, a context that already places it within one of the artist’s most important moments of visibility.
For Luigi Mazzoleni, the work marks a decisive step in Agostino Bonalumi’s (1935–2013) move toward what Gillo Dorfles called the “object painting.” He points back to Bonalumi’s 1962 presentation at Galleria Eidac in Milan, where the artist staged a performance using his own body to shape a large white sheet, as an early sign of the same inquiry into surface, pressure, and form. By the late 1960s, that investigation had expanded into the shaped canvases that made Bonalumi a central figure in postwar Italian art.
The artist’s participation in Lo spazio dell’immagine in Foligno in 1967, alongside Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani, Luciano Fabro, Pino Pascali, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Paolo Scheggi, further clarified the stakes of that project. Bonalumi was not simply altering the canvas; he was testing how painting could become a spatial proposition, with concavity and convexity turning the surface into something closer to an active structure than a passive support.
Davide Mazzoleni said the Unlimited presentation also underscores Bonalumi’s standing at the highest institutional and collecting level, noting that he is the only historic Italian artist featured in the sector. At the same time, he emphasized the artist’s more intimate dimension: a figure who moved between Milan’s cultural circles and the mechanical workshops where many works were realized, while also writing poetry and prose.
That tension between rigor and sensitivity remains central to Bonalumi’s legacy. Seen at Art Basel Unlimited, “Struttura modulare bianca” is not just a historical object, but a work that still asks how painting can generate space rather than merely describe it.
