Antonio Recalcati

The work

Figure of a Man
2008
100 x 91 cm
Oil on canvas

This work belongs to the series Prints, which Recalcati created starting in 1960. The artist, fully clothed, covered himself in paint from head to toe and lay on the canvas, leaving an imprint of the clothes he was wearing. The work represents the absence of the body of an anonymous human figure, defined only by the clothing. The dark imprint of an abandoned T-shirt and jeans are the only identifying marks, accompanied by two colors: a sky-blue band at the top and a sand-colored background.

The artist

(1938, Bresso, Italy – 2022, Milan)

From Milan, where he took his first steps as an artist, Recalcati went to Paris in 1963, where he met the painters Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, and Paul Rebeyrolle. In 1965, together with Aillaud and Arroyo, he created a collective work entitled Live and Let Die or the Tragic End of Marcel Duchamp as a reaction to the conceptual art that Duchamp had pioneered with the Ready Mades.
During the 1970s, his paintings addressed themes of social commitment and repression in subjects such as student struggles and the working class in large cities. From 1980 to 1985, he lived in New York, and from that year on, he settled in Milan.