Titina Maselli was born in Rome in 1924. Generally speaking, her career can be divided between two countries: Italy, where she was chiefly known and respected as a painter; and France, where she worked as a stage designer to great acclaim.
Artistically, her body of work interrogated two of the leading movements that shaped the avant-garde and artistic developments of her native Italy: Futurism and pop art. Futurism manifested itself in Maselli’s work through her visual fascination with and translation of movement, dynamism and speed into pictorial forms, effects and compositions. Whereas the pre-First World War generation was infatuated with the power of the military, motorisation and vehicles, Maselli was much more focused on the muscular, the athletic and the anthropomorphic. Her vertigo-inducing cityscapes teemed with cyclists, boxers and dancers, all a manifestation of the artist’s obsession with the aesthetics of urban life – a facet of her work accentuated by a stay in New York.
Her affiliation with pop art resided more in her use of colour and portrayal of the human form: tendencies inspired by the advertising practices of the era in which she painted. Vibrant colours, stark chromatic contrasts and thick, dark outlines stripped her athletes of their individuality and propelled them into a sphere of idealised symbols – much as advertising does. However, despite admixtures of Futurism and pop art in her influences, Maselli remained an independent figure. As her human forms conveyed so adroitly, she was more preoccupied with depicting conflict than the objects themselves.
In the course of a few years, she rose to prominence among the Italian elite: she enjoyed her first ever solo show at Galleria L’Obelisco in 1948, took part in her first Venice Biennale in 1950, and got her second solo show at Galleria La Tartaruga in 1955, when she would also return to the Biennale. At that time, Italy was a leading cultural hub once again, with international figures such as Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg venturing to the Italian capital.
Maselli’s work as a stage designer came to the fore in France during the 1970s and saw her collaborate with preeminent figures such as Bernard Sobel, Jean Jourdheuil, Carlo Cecchi, Humbert Camerlo and Klaus Michael Grüber. Her approach to this aspect of her work, while inextricable from her painting, was uniquely specific to the art of theatre and the particular relationship between the visual and the spoken word. Maselli was at pains to allow the text to flourish and inhabit its three-dimensional space. She would cast aside the illusory flatness of painting in favour of spatial designs that allowed the work to breathe, punctuated by silence.
Maselli passed away in 2005.
