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Giacomo Balla: Designing the Future

  • Art, Abstract
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Time Out says

They were really tearing up the old art rule book back in the early twentieth century, huh? Giacomo Balla was at the forefront of the Italian avant-garde, pioneering early Italian modernism and becoming a big macher in futurism, the movement he helped found. But this show at the often brilliant and newly refurbished Estorick Collection promises a thorough overview of his influential work, and it falls a little flat.

His early figurative works here aren’t brilliant. There’s some gorgeous use of blue in ‘Woman Sewing’ and some neat and unusual composition in ‘Autospalla’, but a lot of these are sub-Renoir paintings which work as little more than historical curios. What you do notice though is that even in these early works there’s an intense, scribbled cross-hatching of colour that predicts the fury of futurism.

Balla eventually loses the staid reality in favour of total abstraction. He's attempting to capture light, movement, air, freneticism, all in clashing geometric shapes – it’s cubism as chaos, abstraction as reality. Some of these paintings are stunning, but most simply are not great Balla works. There are interesting pieces here, sure, but these really do feel like mainly second-rate Balla paintings. The rest of the show is dedicated to his clothing and set designs and a room of sketches – again, it’s interesting, but not brilliant. The idea is to show Balla’s incredible vision for the future, that the brutality and speed of futurism could be adapted for everyday use, for fashion, theatre and homewares. But with that as the aim, it fails, because this isn’t fantastic design, and it’s – realistically – only vaguely interesting as fashion. 

There’s a lot of wall text in this show, a lot of context and historical reasoning, and that’s meant to make up for the paucity of quality. Not because Balla isn’t good, but because this isn’t him at his best.

@eddyfrankel

Eddy Frankel
Written by
Eddy Frankel

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