César ^©  

(1921 - 1998)

Blindarte kindly thanks to Guillaume Aral of the Galerie Ferrero, Nice, for the help in compiling this sheet

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César, stage name of César Baldaccini (Marseille, 1921 - Paris, 1998), after training first Marseille and then Parisian, approaches the avant-garde environments, beginning in the fifties to stand out in the artistic environment for his research free from any formal scheme and contrary to both Abstractionism and the extreme positions of Constructivism and Neoplasticism. César began to include in his works a wide range of materials: raw iron, recycled from the metallurgical industries, tubes, bolts, screws, recycled materials, used and deteriorated, which the artist assembled creating imaginary figures in which the taste of the horrid merged with a strong ironic charge. In the sixties he joined the Nouveaux Réalistes formed among others by Arman, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Jean Tinguely and Pierre Restany.

In the same period he experiences the crushing of old cars under a gigantic industrial press imported from the United States, from which emerge incredible blocks of prismatic shape, thus starting the series of "Compressions"of which the presented work is a perfect example. César begins to select elements according to their shape and color, placing them in the press, and then proceed to compression. The result is a crumpled metal surface, flattened and twisted, which creates an unexpected effect, highlighting the structure of the material itself. (from the artist’s biography by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice).