Run The Planet Museum – World Art Tour

London (United Kingdom)

Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio

By Umberto Boccioni
Tate Modern, London (United Kingdom)

In 1913 Boccioni realized the statue titled "Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio" ("Unique forms of continuity in space"; bronze, dimensions 110 centimeters) where the traditional heroic nude is revisited according to the Futurist movement's ideals of progress, power, speed and dynamism, and the necessity that art keep pace with the modern technological and industrial civilization away from the retrospective Italian dream of an antique Reinassance past. He said "To render a body in motion, I definitely do not present the trajectory, that is the passage from one state of response to another state of response, but force myself to ascertain the form that expresses the continuity in space".

Painter, sculptor and etcher, Umberto Boccioni was born in Reggio di Calabria (Italy) on April 19, 1882. In 1889 he attended the painting school Scuola Libera del Nudo in Roma, where he met Gino Severini and also Balla who gave him his first instruction in painting. Boccioni spent the following years traveling to Paris (France) and Saint Petersburg (Russia). Then he came back to Italy. He settled in Milano in 1908, and in 1910 Boccioni met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Sironi and Cambelotti. With Carrà, Russolo and Severini he is one of the signatories of the two manifestos of Futurist painting (the first one in 1910), and soon he became the leading theoretician of the movement. During these years he became a sculptor, and in 1912 he issued a Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture. Wounded while fighting in the Italian Army in 1915, he died in 1916, after falling from a horse during a military exercise near Verona.

This work of art is also on display at Civico Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Milano (Italy), The Museum of Modern Art in New York City (USA/New York), Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo (Netherlands), and is part of a private collection in Rome (Italy).