Bambina che gioca

Purchased in 1933 from the "IV Mostra del Sindacato Regionale Fascista delle Belle Arti di Lombardia" at the Permanente in Milan, this work would later be dated to this same year. Following his early training in Mantua, his further studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and a period at the Milanese Accademia di Brera under Adolf Wildt, Bergonzoni then spent a year specialing at the Ecole del Beaux-Arts in Paris. Returning to Italy in 1928, he set up his studio in via degli Imbriani on the outskirts of Milan. "Bambina che gioca" is one of the few sculptures from the thirties not to have been dispersed or destroyed by the artist himself. This work therefore constitutes a rare testimony to how the terracotta, which would always remain his favoured medium, was used by the artist in his sculptural research of those years - in some ways not dissimilar to the treatment oh the "Signorina seduta" by Lucio Fontana, with whom he shared a studio in 1932 - to elaborate everyday themes according to a popular archaic scheme. In relation to this approach, the critics often called into discussion the affinity of the artist's delicate touch to the pictorial naivety of the so called "chiaristi". After the war Bergonzoni, who had returned to Mantua in 1942, dedicated himself to a figurative realism, focusing on the subject of labour and fatigue, similar to that of his fellow countruman Giuseppe Gorni in the "harsh closing of some images." Finally, during the fifties he would orient himself towards a more abstract research. [Mariella Milan]