Costume sketch
Signed E Prampolini Futurist Rome. Probably executed in 1923 in connection with stage setting and costumes for "Psicologia delle macchine". Tempera and pen on cardboard, image area 22 x 19.5 cm, overall dimensions 32 x 25 cm.
Enrico Prampolini (Modena, 1894 - Rome, 1956) is not only one of the most important exponents of Italian Futurism. Painter, sculptor, set and costume designer, the artist was active in all fields, combining his pictorial activity with a theoretical focus that led him to dialogue with some of the most important figures of the European avant-garde.
Prampolini became part of the Futurist movement at the age of only 18, when he enthusiastically joined Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's movement and began attending Giacomo Balla's atelier. Together with Balla and his friend Fortunato Depero, he was a protagonist of the turning point of Roman Futurism in the direction of greater analog abstraction and began to incorporate Futurist principles into scenography, to which he devoted himself with great enthusiasm in the late 1910s and early 1920s.
The author Maurizio Scudiero, a leading expert on Futurism and Director of the Depero National Archive, has commented on the present work by Prampolini. He notes a clear similarity to the theatre and costume sketches that Prampolini created for the production Psicologia delle macchine, staged in 1923 at the Odeon in Milan.