ENRICO BAJ Italian, 1924-2003

The work of Enrico Baj encompasses Dada and Surrealism and masterfully subverts mainstream artistic conventions. The work is seriously political, but also absurd, in sympathy with peers like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia. With a passion for the eccentric and a strong iconoclastic impulse, Baj was one of the central figures of the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde. Born in Milan, his art and writings played an instrumental role in influential movements, from Dada and Surrealism to Art Informel and CoBrA, as well as the Nuclear Art movement, which he cofounded in 1951. 

Heir to the Surrealist-Dadaist spirit, and an experimenter in original styles and techniques, Baj departed from gestural abstraction in the mid-1950s and honed an idiosyncratic iconography for his paintings, drawings, collages, objects, and sculptures, defiantly embracing figuration and kitsch symbols and subverting conventions. He used so-called low-brow, everyday detritus objects to infuse his surfaces and content with sophistication.

Ever since his participation in the Venice Biennale in 1964, Baj's art has been exhibited in all the major European museums and frequently in the United States since 1960. Baj will have an upcoming retrospective celebrating his centennial at the Palazzo Reale, Milan.  Baj's work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; among others.