Costantino Nivola | sculpture & sandcast reliefs: Drawing Room Projects/NYC and Victoria Munroe Fine Art
On view through December 14, 2024, Victoria Munroe Fine Art is delighted to announce Costantino Nivola (1911-1988): Sculpture & Sandcast Reliefs, an exhibition presented by Drawing Room Projects. The exhibition spans four decades of Nivola’s figurative sculpture, including a brilliant fresco from 1959, important examples of his innovative sandcast reliefs, and sculptures in concrete, marble, terracotta and bronze.
Nivola’s natural intuition about materials and proportion began with his early practice as a Sardinian mason and grew from his training in design and architecture at the Instituto d’Arte, Monza, Italy in 1935. Nivola immigrated to New York City with his wife Ruth Guggenheim in 1939, via Milan and Paris where he was trained in painting, architecture and design. Their move to The Springs in Long Island in the late 1940s placed the Nivolas at the center of the birth of Abstract Expressionism that was underway in the studios of his friends Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. Other artists in their community included émigré artists renowned for their original, radical responses to the contrast of life between the wars in Europe and America.
Drawn to the qualities of both high and low materials in modern art, Nivola was a master of traditional sculpture techniques as well as an innovator of methods for large scale mural reliefs. Sculpting in bronze, concrete, marble and terracotta he reimagined the modern idol after Cubism at the peak of Abstract Expressionism. By 1953, Nivola’s ambitious sandcast process for wall reliefs won him the commission for a grand architectural mural for the first Olivetti showroom in America in New York City. Collaborations with noted international architects inspired by the success of his Olivetti mural continued through the 1980s with numerous prestigious public commissions on buildings designed by Eero Saarinen, Jose Luis Sert, Serge Chermayeff and Marcel Breuer.
