b. 1919, Venice; d. 2006, Venice

Emilio Vedova was born in 1919 in Venice. Essentially a self-taught artist, he joined the Milanese artists’ association, Corrente, which also included Renato Birolli, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti, and Umberto Vittorini, around 1942. Vedova participated in the resistance movement from 1943 to 1945. In 1946 he collaborated with Morlotti on the manifesto Oltre Guernica in Milan and was a founding member of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti in Venice. He described his paintings of this period, 1946–50, as Geometrie nere.

Vedova’s first solo show in the United States was held at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York in 1951. That same year he was awarded the prize for young painters at the first São Paulo Bienal. In 1952 he participated in the Gruppo degli Otto, organized by Lionello Venturi. Vedova was the Italian representative at the first Documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1955 and won a Guggenheim International Award in 1956. He executed his first lithographs in 1958, the year he went to Poland on the occasion of his retrospective at the Muzeum Narodowe in Poznan and the Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw. In 1959 he created large L-shaped canvases, called Scontri di situazioni, which were exhibited in an environment created by Carlo Scarpa for the exhibition Vitalità nell’arte, which opened at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, and traveled to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. This led to the first Plurimi in 1961–63: freestanding, hinged, and painted sculpture/paintings made of wood and metal.

Vedova was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the 1960 Venice Biennale, the year in which he created moving light sets and costumes for Luigi Nono’s opera Intolleranza ’60. From 1963 to 1965, Vedova worked in Berlin, at the Deutsche Akademischer Austausch Dienst, and created his best-known Plurimi, the Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch, seven of which were presented in 1964 at Documenta 3, Kassel. From 1965 to 1969 (and in 1988), he succeeded Oskar Kokoschka as Director of the Internationale Sommerakademie in Salzburg. In 1965 and 1983 he traveled in the United States, where he lectured extensively. For the Italian Pavilion at Expo ’67, Montreal, he created a light collage using glass plates to project mobile images across a large asymmetric space. Vedova taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice, from 1975 to 1986. After the late 1970s, he experimented with a variety of new techniques and formats such as the Plurimi-Binari (mobile works on steel rails), monotypes, double-sided circular panels (Dischi), and large-scale glass engraving. In 1995 he began a new series of multifaceted and manipulable painted objects called Disco-Plurimo. In 2005 he created a new group of monotypes, Spazi Opposti, which was exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice the following year. In the last ten years of his life, Vedova’s contributions to art were recognized with numerous solo exhibitions as well as distinguished prizes, including the title of Cavaliere di Gran Croce della Repubblica Italiana (1996) and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale (1997). Vedova continued to actively experiment in painting and printmaking until he died at the age of eighty-seven in his home in Venice on October 25, 2006.