La grande madre

The brother of fellow artists Afro and Dino, Mirko Basaldella was a leading figure in the Italian school of Art Informel. He trained in Milan in the studio of Arturo Martini and married Corrado Cagli’s sister Serena.
He is remembered for the monumental gates of the Fosse Ardeatine, an extraordinary work designed in the period 1949-1950. He exhibited work in the USA in the second half of the 1950s and came into contact with the American avant-garde, especially Jackson Pollock, and the cultural artefacts of the Amerindians and the pre-Columbian civilizations, which were to have a deep influence on the forms of his art. The constants of the period 1957-1959, to which The Great Mother belongs, are monumentality and sculptural power. The work is an anthropomorphic figure with sacral overtones suggesting the deep bond between man and nature. Enrico Crispolti spoke with reference to Mirko’s work of primordial mythopoeia, whereby the artist seeks the foundation of his contemporary reality in archetypes, constructing totemic icons that perform a storytelling function in a dramatic reality where it is no longer nature but history that acts as a cruel stepmother in Leopardi’s sense and leaves mankind no possibility of salvation. (Transl. by Paul Metcalfe per Scriptum, Roma)