Ddamaino

ABOUT ARTIST

Dadamaino (b. 1930, Italy - d. 2004, Italy) completed a medical degree before taking up art at the end of the 1950s. She frequented a group of young artists who followed Lucio Fontana and the Spatialism movement. Members of the group included: Piero Manzoni, Gianni Colombo, Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi.

Like her contemporaries in Italy, she made work that solely utilizes the forces of light, movement, and dimension within the canvas. A native Milanese, Dadamaino was a self taught painter who became an active figure in the Italian avant-garde. Her background in the sciences inspired her experimentative process of making art; she would investigate materials like plastic, metal, and canvases in a clinical manner, drawing out its most innate properties to make the work interact with the forces of nature. She is most known for her hole paintings, where she punctures superimposed layers of canvases. 

Her connections to the Zero and Spatialist movements granted her several solo and group shows across Italy during the 1950s-60s. She joined the Milan-based experimental group Azimuth, founded by Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, and Mazoni. She had her first solo show in 1958 at the Galleria dei Bossi in Milan to showcase her body of work titled Volumi. Her artist name was born in 1961 when press for a group show she was participating in, in the Netherlands, mistyped her name as Dadamaino. Her work was featured in the major Nul group exhibition in 1962 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. The same year she joined the newly founded Nouvelle Tendance movement, in which she became particularly fascinated with the idea of movement, and brought a new era of optical-dynamism into her work. 

Dadamaino’s works were housed in many notable collections: at Museo del Novecento, Milan, Musee de Grenoble, Grenoble, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Tate Modern, London, Hilti Art Foundation, Liechtenstein, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia , Guggenheim Museum of Art, Venice, Kunstmuseum Reutlingen, Konkret, Reutlingen.