Emilio Vedova. Tempo Inciso Solo exhibition at the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova in Venice, Italy

Emilio Vedova. Tempo Inciso is a vast and comprehensive exhibition on the Venetian master’s graphic work held by the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova. It is divided between the two venues on the Zattere, the Magazzino del Sale and the Spazio Vedova and sums up the decisive centrality of these techniques – engraving, screenprinting, lithography and collage – in Vedova’s work, starting from the 1960s. The exhibition was curated with great care and enthusiasm by Fabrizio Gazzarri, Emilio Vedova’s assistant for decades (and former Director of the Archive and the Collection of Fondazione Vedova), who died suddenly at the beginning of July 2023.

The graphic arts always fascinated Vedova at the various salient moments of his career, as documented in the Magazzino del Sale and the Spazio Vedova, where a large selection of the master’s works can be admired, many previously unshown. They range from the lithographs of the 1960s to the last engravings and screenprints of the 1990s and 2000s, accompanied by three-dimensional works (the “litoplurime” and “seriplurime” of the 1970s), where the choice of bifacial printing is ideally linked to the complexity of the previous decade’s plurimi.
The materials used, such as acid, metals, stone, inks, film collages, montages of images taken directly from the print media and photographs, all had their rightful place in the “palette” of Vedova’s operations, expressing his communicative “urgency”. These are complex stimuli that came from afar, also from his experience in Berlin, to which the seven fotocollages of 1968 in the exhibition are specifically related.
Vedova’s graphics are therefore not the “engagement-disengagement” of the left hand, but enter fully into, or actually themselves make up, Vedova’s real-ideal world.

The Machina Robotica will be in operation at the Magazzino del Sale, bringing visitors the various cycles of graphic works including engravings, lithographs, screenprints and vitreographs.
A precious video setting on the world of Vedova’s graphics made by Tomaso Pessina of Twin Studio, in which period footage is also used, can admired in the so-called Spazio Vedova, next to the Magazzino del Sale (also on the Zattere).