SOLD The Wedding (1951)

Oil on canvas 30 x 23 inches Signed lower right Provenance: Grace Borgenicht Gallery, 1979 Private collection, Woodstock, NY, 1979-1998 „ Attilio Salemme’s untimely death came at the height of his extraordinary artistic career. Since his passing, the artist has been honored with retrospectives at the Whitney Museum in1959 and the National Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum in 1978. Salemme was an “artist’s artist” who developed a poetic and metaphysical style all his own. In his catalogue essay for the 1978 Salemme retrospective, Thomas Messer wrote: “In the span of only a dozen years Salemme developed an idiom richly personal and singular in its relation to contemporary art. His works display a vocabulary of abstract organic and geometric shapes, suggesting figures or architectural elements. The imagery evokes strong feelings of isolation … but are balanced by an opposite and light aspect of Salemme’s sensibility.” The artist exhibited in more than seventy group shows, twenty-one one-man shows, and eleven museum shows. Between 1947 and 1953 his work was purchased for the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art , the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.