Pietro Consagra was born in 1920 in Mazara del Vallo, a small town in the Sicilian province of Trapani. An advocate of sculpture, he wilfully – and sometimes controversially – carved out his own path amid the numerous changes of the 20th century. Having initially trained as a sailor in 1931, he worked as a mechanic and later became a captain. After moving to Palermo in 1938, his artistic interest was piqued when he enrolled at the arts college, graduating in 1941 after a battle with tuberculosis. The future sculptor then immediately enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo, furthering his training under Archimede Campini.
Following his graduation from the academy in 1944, he moved to the recently liberated Rome for two years. He took supplementary courses in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and was introduced to intellectual circles by fellow Sicilian artists Concetto Maugeri and Renato Guttuso. He eventually dropped out of the academy to travel to Paris in 1946. Inspired by the constant aesthetic stimulation of the French capital, Consagra returned to Rome with renewed vigour. His desire for ground-breaking novelty materialised in a manifesto published in the first issue of Forma magazine in 1947. Together with his fellow artists Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Pietro Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo and Giulio Turcato, he was involved in the creation of the Forma I group, which sought to position itself as ‘formalist and Marxist’ and promote ‘abstractionism’ over the latent distortive efforts of early abstract pioneers. Consagra’s literary theorising did not stop there. The group held its first exhibition in the year of its inception at the Art Club Gallery in Rome. In 1952 he wrote a polemical pamphlet entitled The necessity of sculpture, which vehemently refuted Arturo Martini’s 1945 work Sculpture: a dead language. In the 1960s he launched the Continuità group – an offshoot of Forma I.
Although Consagra stylistically came into his own when combining pictorial flatness with sculptural spatiality into ‘bifrontals’ during the 1980s, recognition arrived much earlier. As early as the 1950s, some of his metal works were included in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Exhibitions across European cities and galleries swiftly followed. Venice would continue to show support for Consagra, with the sculptor winning the Grand Prize for his artistic medium at the 1960 biennale. Indeed, he would feature at the biennale on no fewer than 11 occasions between 1950 and 1993. His works began populating major art collections across the world.
With recognition came commissions and the opportunity to devise projects – be they artistic or cultural – on a larger scale, the open-air museum in the rebuilt Gibellina in Sicily being a prime example. Co-founded with the assistance of Ludovico Corrao, the institution was designed with urbanistic proportions. His dying wish was to be buried in a nearby cemetery.
In addition to his manifestos, Consagra continued writing and publishing throughout his career, including L’agguato c’è (1960), La città frontale (1969) and Vita Mia, his autobiography (1980).
Various retrospectives of his work have been organised, including at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome (1989) and a special exhibition for the inauguration of a permanent exhibit (1993); the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg (1991); and the Institut Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt (1997); In 2002 the City Gallery of Stuttgart also opened a permanent exhibition of his work. Consagra passed away in Milan in 2005.
