Colloquio, 1957

“When I became aware of the responsibility, of the significance assumed by every gesture the artist makes, I felt this need: to remove sculpture from the ideal center. At the same time I realized that this shift gave a dramatic character to the sculpture.” (Lonzi, C. “Intervista a Pietro Consagra,” in Consagra, exhibition catalogue. Milan: Galleria dell’Ariete, 1967). With these words, Pietro Consagra describes one of the fundamental principles that guided his research and led him to develop the Colloqui (Conversations) series between 1952 and 1962. The first fully autonomous expression in the context of the artist’s career, this series focuses on an operation of subtraction, through which Consagra removes sculpture from the traditional category of the monument and from the association with the idea of power, consigning it, instead, to a human dimension, existential in nature. [...]