Giacomo Balla, Autosmorfia

Autosmorfia (self-portrait)

Self-Portrait (1902)

Girl running on a balcony (1912), oil on canvas

This particular piece of art is a kinesthetic study of a figure in motion. Mimicking the pointillist technique, Balla has not mixed the non-primary colors, but creates them by painting contrasting dots in close contact to one another. This technique is repeated throughout the picture's surface. The artwork does not have a central point of focus. It appears to be continuing outside the canvas to the spectator’s space, emphasizing the continuous character of the girl’s motion.

Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio

(Dynamism of a dog on a leash) (1912)

Here Balla got to grips with the problem of recreating speed and flight by superimposing several images on top of each other. Inevitably, the advances that were made by this short-lived movement were eventually to be overtaken by the art of cinematography.

Speed of a Motorcycle 1913-14

Planet Mercury Passing in Front of the Sun, 1914

Mercurio Sole

Plastic Ensemble (1915)

Autostati d’animo (1920)

Future, 1923

Born in 1871, Giacomo Balla was the senior member of the first wave of Futurist painters and was a teacher (Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini were pupils). His early, pre-Futurist period was influenced by the pointillism of Georges Seurat. In 1912 he joined the Futurist movement. His painting style underwent a dramatic change about 1909 when he became preoccupied with the pictorial depiction of light, movement and speed. In his work to 1914 he decomposed movement and light but his compositions moved ever closer to total abstraction as, for example, with Perils of War (1915). By 1914 Balla was advocating a Futurist lifestyle - he even named his two daughters Propeller and Light - and his energies expanded to include sculpture and the applied arts, especially costume and theatre design. In the Twenties, during the so-called second wave of Futurism, Balla was still a compelling force within the ranks of the new, young Futurists. Gradually giving more value to geometric forms, his style regularly alternated between abstract machine-like constructions and figurative representations. Giacomo Balla died in 1958.

source: trindera