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Gianni Monnet seems to have fallen through the cracks of art history, which is sad in all sorts of ways. Of all the artists of MAC, the Movimento Arte Concreta, which lasted from 1948 to 1958, Gianni Monnet seems to have been the joker in the pack. His original works contributed to Documenti d'arte d'oggi, the movement's four-volume journal, are almost uncategorisable, so intent was Monnet on sticking on various bits of material, ranging from furry purple felt to sandpaper to corrugated card. I've already posted here about an instance in which a lithograph had holes hand-punched through it, a piece of scrumpled newspaper collaged to it, and sandpaper and corrugated card fixed to the facing page in order to make visible impressions on the surface of the litho. Surface and the rupturing of the surface; texture and the effects of texture on the untextured surface; these seem to have been his obsessions. Gianni Monnet Untitled lithograph, 1955 Gianni Monnet Untitled lithogr

Concrete Art is a term applied to various abstract art movements. The term was coined by Theo van Doesburg in his 1930 Manifesto of Concrete Art. Van Doesburg's insistence that art should be formed from the "concrete" elements of form and colour without reference to the physical world was championed by the Swiss artist Max Bill, a former student of Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus. In the late 1940s and the 1950s two groups influenced by Bill flourished in France and Italy: Groupe Espace and MAC, the Movimento Arte Concreta. The two groups exhibited in combination in Italy as Gruppo Espace. Poster for the 1954-1955 Gruppo Espace exhibition in Milan, and the verso with woodcuts by Enrico Bordoni (1904-1969) and Silvano Bozzolini (1911-1998) MAC was formed in 1948 by four Italian artists: Atanasio Soldati, Gillo Dorfles, Bruno Munari, and Gianni Monnet. It disbanded in 1958, following the premature death of Gianni Monnet at the age of 46.   Besides collecti