Gianni Colombo Strutturazione Pulsante

Gianni Colombo Strutturazione Pulsante, 1960
Polystyrene in wooden box with electrical motor

Gianni Colombo was one of the most important Kinetic artists – a movement based on early 20th century futurist tendencies which developed internationally during the 1950s. Kinetic Art explored the possibility of art in movement as a revolutionary artform that would allow for active participation of viewers, no longer simply kept in the role of passive spectators. Kinetic artists such as Gianni Colombo and Jesus Rafael Soto, were utopian and visionary; they saw artistic practice as part of an attempt to revolutionize daily life through perceptual freedom and the emancipation of the senses – feeling ourselves feeling. Against the notion of individual authorship, in 1959–60 Gianni Colombo founded the Gruppo T, an experimental art collective. He won a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1968 for his Elastic Space (1967), a dark room you enter that seems to morph and move around you, expanding and contracting.