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Original Comic Arts & Illustrations

Friday 17 November 2023 e Saturday 18 November 2023, 11:00 AM • Rome

344

Hugo Pratt

La Telefonata, 1965

Estimate

€ 12.500 - 17.000

Sold

€ 31.200

The price includes buyer's premium

Information

oil and tempera on canvas
100 x 80 cm
Original painting made by Pratt for the exhibition "La Telefonata" held at the Il Cerchio gallery in Venice in July 1965, published in black and white in the rare exhibition catalog of which we attach a copy signed by Pratt himself. The artwork was recently exhibited in the exhibition "The painter and the model from Canova to Picasso" held in Treviso between 2010 and 2011, published in the catalog of the same name edited by Nico Stringa by the Canova publishing house, the artwork was also used to print a promotional postcard for the event (a copy of which is attached). For the first time on the market one of the legendary "lost" paintings dating back to the only two personal exhibitions held by Pratt in Venice in 1965 and 1967. Pratt has now returned from Argentina in the mid-1960s and lives with his wife Anne Frognier in home of Malamocco, Corto Maltese is not yet in his thoughts. In those years, Lichtenstein's Pop Art conquered Venice and plundered the world of comics, so the thirty-eight-year-old Pratt organized his original counterattack: he began to execute a series of large-format paintings that would give life to the 1965 exhibition centered on the figure of the telephone . With these few paintings (a true unicum within his production) the master of Malamocco decided to respond to the operations of revisiting comics carried out by the major exponents of Pop Art, so if the painters were inspired by comics, Pratt, certainly one of the major exponents of European comics of the time, decided to try his hand at painting. The perspective disruption and the focus on certain details of an image introduce into the painting the most daring ideas typical of the world of comics. It is precisely on these paintings that Pratt will base his future work of the famous Pop Art style portfolios such as "BRR...BRRR ..! The british winter's grenadiers" from 1967 and "Il Tempo di una Sigaretta" from 1977. There is a slight abrasion of the pictorial layer (14 cm) on the upper margin. A museum artwork. Signed and dated.