A graduate in engineering and a great lover of music, Fausto Melotti (Rovereto, Italy, 1901 – Milan, Italy, 1986), exhibited during the 1930s at the Galleria del Milione in Milan, then the vital center of Italian abstraction. Instead of the more traditional and stately marble and bronze, Melotti’s works from this period are almost two-dimensional plaster sculptures, or bas-reliefs constructed according to a harmonic rhythm of solids and voids. Scultura n. 24 (Sculpture # 24), 1935—where linear figures project from the background and assume the form of a delicate arabesque—comes from this period.

These small-scale wall sculptures condense existential anguish within the intimacy of the private dwelling, but they also reveal the artist’s ironic approach to the world.