Image dimensions: 41.5 x 38 cm.
Female Nude is a wonderful and rare lithograph realized by the artist Ivo Pannaggi in a circulation of 100 prints around 1975 from one of his original drawings of the 1920s.
The state of preservation is excellent. In the image, “P/20” is printed on the lower right. On the lower left, “74/100” is written in pencil, whilst on the lower right, the artwork is signed “Ivo Pannaggi” in pencil.
The 1970s are the years of rediscovery of Futurism in the Italian and international art critique. Thus, he drew out some original works of the 1920s and proposed them as lithographs with limited editions, just like this one.
Mechanical Composition, apart from being a beautiful lithograph, takes on a unique meaning for those who love Futurist art and the work of an important artist like Ivo Pannaggi in the field of European artistic avantgarde.
Ivo Pannaggi (Macerata, 1901-1981) was an eclectic artist who debuted, very young, in the Futurist sphere. In 1922, he published the newspaper Noi together with Paladini, and later, with Prampolini, the Manifesto Futurista dell’Arte Meccanica (Futurist Manifesto of Mechanical Art), for which the drawing that inspired this lithograph was realized. The Manifesto sanctions and officializes a fundamental aspect of Futurist aesthetics, already delineated clearly in the manifesto of F.T. Marinetti of 1909, subsequently developed in 1915 in the Manifesto of Ricostruzione futurista dell'universo (Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe) of Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero. Human figures, animals, and landscapes acquire mechanical artificial forms, paying an enthusiastic homage to technical progress and modernity. The artist, during those years, is also architect of interiors, graphic designer, advertiser, innovator in the caricature field, which becomes a real Futurist artistic genre, as well as precursor of Mailing Art. Pannaggi exhibited his works with Futurists also in the USA, but he also felt close, both ideologically and artistically, to Soviet avantgardes.
From 1927 to 1939, he was in Germany, where he attended the Bauhaus of Weimar. He started working as correspondent from Lapland taking part in arctic expeditions, a task that he would document as photojournalist during the war, travelling around Germany, Norway, Venezuela, Brazil, and Africa. After the war, he moved to Norway, where he resumed his artistic activity especially as architect and designer. In the 1970s, he decided to go back to Italy and to settle in Macerata.
