Enrico Baj biography

Enrico Baj was an Italian painter, sculptor, essayist, writer, and one of the most important post-war artists. He was born in Milan in 1924. He studied at the Liceo Ginnasio Giovanni Berchet, then enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Milan, only to abandon it in favor of the Faculty of Law and the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, which he attended simultaneously.
Throughout his life, he always had relationships with Italian and foreign poets and writers, including André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Queneau, Edoardo Sanguineti, Umberto Eco, and adhered to various artistic movements, including Surrealism, New Realism, and Pataphysics, until he founded the Nuclear Movement in 1951 with Sergio Dangelo and Gianni Dova. The founding principle of the Nuclear Movement was the belief that all forms disintegrate because the new forms of man are those of the atomic universe. According to Baj, all of humanity has become a slave to technology, and to find the new reality, it is necessary to delve into the atom, for it is there that the entire universe is found."
In 1953, together with Asger Jorn, he founded the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, in opposition to the Ulm School of Max Bill; in 1954, the two artists initiated the International Ceramics Meetings in Albissola Marina at Ceramiche Mazzotti, which were attended by Lucio Fontana, Emilio Scanavino, Karel Appel, Guillaume Corneille, Roberto Matta, Aligi Sassu, Édouard Jaguer.
In the 1950s, Enrico Baj collaborated with the avant-garde magazines Il Gesto, Boa, and Phases. Over the years, his passion for writing increased, leading him to publish numerous books, including Patafisica, Automitobiografia, Impariamo la pittura, Fantasia e realtà con Guttuso, Ecologia dell'arte.
In 1957, Enrico Baj signed the manifesto Against Style and held his first solo exhibition abroad at Gallery One in London. In 1959, he joined the Manifeste de Naples.
In 1962, he participated in the exhibition The Art of Assemblage in New York, during which he met Duchamp.
Between 1963 and 1966, he spent a lot of time in Paris, where he became a member of the Collège de Pataphysique. In 1964, he was granted a personal room at the Venice Biennale and in the same year exhibited at the Milan Triennale.
Enrico Baj elaborates and composes his works with extremely particular and unusual materials, such as wood, fabrics, plastic, or even with hydraulic pipes. The choice behind the use of these materials is justified by the fact that the artist himself believes they represent the new world we live in. In fact, Enrico Baj often represents his works as the mirror of a deformed reality, totally different from what is usually seen, because humanity has lost its shape, becoming a slave to appearance and technology. In his works, the artist uses different techniques, engaging in dripping, collage, inlay, or even veneering.
Among his most famous works that have marked the history of contemporary art, we remember the series of Generals which grotesquely depict generals in service uniforms. Enrico Baj's interest in this subject stems from the fact that the artist fully experienced the period of the Second World War, observing the destruction of the sense of humanity in its most complete form.
The Funeral of the Anarchist Pinelli is an enormous artwork of carving, standing 3 meters tall and 12 meters long. Within the composition, there are 18 figures carved by the artist, including Pinelli, who is praised by the characters on the right side and practically lynched by the characters always in military uniform and with monstrous features on his left. This work represents the interest that Enrico Baj has always had in the field of public justice, an opinion that has often ideologically aligned him with the revolutionaries, who wish to change the world in favor of a stronger sense of humanity than the current one.
The series of sculptures of the Plastic Ties represents one of the symbols of modern social status, the ties themselves, made from a material that now pervades the entire modern world. It is a collection of works with a strong connotation of social criticism.
Even Manichini, along with Epater le robot, represent a very strong message of social criticism, in which Enrico Baj discusses a society now completely lost in the process of infinite progress, of which it is increasingly a slave and less a master.
In the Tribal Masks, we find Enrico Baj's warning against the Western society of the late twentieth century, which has lost any sense of psycho-cultural evolution, reverting, in human terms, to a primitive stage. It is all obviously an oxymoron in relation to the unbridled progressivism, criticized by the artist in practically all his works.
Enrico Baj dies in Vergiate in the province of Varese in 2003.