Giuseppe Spagnulo began working in the early 1960s, using terracotta to create dialogues between geometric and corporeal forms, as if to anchor the elusiveness of the individual to volumetric laws. Between 1965 and 1966 he changed language and material, moving from terracotta to wood and from figuratively inspired motifs to pure abstraction.
With wood, Spagnulo has said he fully understood the problem of space, and this approach to sculpture is one that he has maintained since.
“The form, in its immobility has no statuary possibility,” Spagnulo has written, “but it violates the space and enables any structural complication, or itself is violated and removed of idealization. I don’t believe in one form being more perfect than another, but only in the quantity of space that a form manages to activate.” (“La forma non nella sua immobilità,” in Caramel, L., 10 scultori italiani d’oggi. Lissone: Premio Lissone, 1967).
