Yesterday we looked at Niki de Saint Phalle's Tirs, so let's continue the art thread for another day by looking at Enrico Baj's assemblages. Baj started developing his art in the '50s, when he co-founded with painter Sergio Dangelo the Movimento d'Arte Nucleare (Nuclear Art Movement), rejecting conformity and authority.
Influenced by movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism, and artists including Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Max Ernst, and sharing a passion for assemblages of borrowed objects with French Nouveau Rèalisme, Baj created collaged canvases with scraps, bits and pieces of furniture, knobs, handles and fragments of wood.
His most famous series remains the one entitled "Dames" that he started in the mid-'60s. The Dames series included assemblaged portraits of women made with buttons, pieces of brocade fabrics, yarns, tassels and other assorted found objects on patterned wallpaper or fabric backgrounds.
The results - some of them currently on display at the 55th International Venice Art Biennale (until 24th November) are primitive and abstracted forms: from alien monsters with a playful twist about them, such as a face with just one eyeball, to sets of ropes that add a menacing aspect to the portraits.
Baj employed homely materials and transformed them, tackling in this way the concept of mutability, and the possibility of transcending reality through his kitsch, whimsical, and tongue-in-cheek canvases that also mock the avant-garde.
Can you think about any fashion collections or any specific designs that transform the reality in a playful way while mocking the fashion industry?
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