Vatican Museums

Superficie 287 demonstrates Giuseppe Capogrossi’s full stylistic maturity. When he produced the work, at the end of the 1950s, the artist had already definitively distanced himself from figuration in favour of a language concentrating on the repeated use of the same sign – the “morpheme” – and a few basic colours. From 1949 this sign, a sort of “comb” became the key form in his works, the sole presence inhabiting the surfaces. Capogrossi multiplied it and combined it in ever new solutions, transforming it into the principal generator of compositional space, demonstrating that the subject, once the result of careful observation of reality and nature, may be the fruit of the creative force of the artist alone.