Description:

Porfirio Didonna
American, (1942 - 1986)
untitled, 1973
mixed media on paper
Signed and dated lower right.

Provenance: Nielsen Gallery, MA.

Biography from Nielsen Gallery: Porfirio DiDonna was born in 1942 in the tough Red Hook section of Brooklyn, the third of four children in a first generation Italian family. His father supported the family by working on the Brooklyn docks, After graduating from high school he enrolled at Pratt Institute and received his bachelor's degree. A year later, he entered Columbia University and in 1968 was awarded an MFA degree from the studio art program.

After Pratt, he was interested in internal shapes that reflected the character of the arc-sided or angular contours of his paintings. By 1971 he dramatically simplified his work, limiting himself to small dots, dashes, and taut lines, exploring their rhythmic character and harmonics visually within a strict format. He began to attract the attention of a few young dealers in Manhattan with this severe new work. He was included in several group shows, including the prestigious Bykart Gallery, and in 1974 was given his first solo exhibition by Ivan Karp at the OK Harris Gallery on West Broadway. He was awarded a National Endowment Grant in 1975.

In the winter of 1978, DiDonna was invited to be a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Shortly before Chicago, DiDonna met Lee Sherry, a young painter living in the artist section of SoHo. DiDonna began to open up his strict discipline, loosening his exacting horizontal-vertical marks by inserting arcs and simple linear "windows" into his tight compositions. They complicated his internal rhythms and sometimes the arcs appeared to suggest an hourglass shape. He and Sherry began living together during this period in a loft that DiDonna rented. They began talking about taking trips; and, to the surprise of his friends, they traveled to Italy in 1980 and to Mexico in 1981. It was during this period that he began to identify the potent hourglass shape-vessel with important religious connections he had known as a boy, which he acknowledged with titles such as Vestment, Buttress, Abundance, and Triad.

In early 1984 DiDonna concentrated exclusively on drawings. He was fascinated with a wavy, connecting arc'd linear movement related to the single arcs of his recent work. The drawings would lead to the most dramatic paintings of his career. He began to refer to the undulating movement as a "road" and, in retrospect, it was as if he began to realize that his recent hourglass-vessel fascination had grown out of the continuum of his entire work, including his Catholic upbringing, his student still life work, his parallel dots and dash configurations, and his shaped paintings.

In November 1985 DiDonna suddenly suffered a series of excruciating headaches. He was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor. He died at the age of forty-four on August 26, 1986.

  • Dimensions: 19"H x 26"W (sight), 22 1/2"H x 29 1/2"W (frame)
  • Medium: mixed media on paper

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July 20, 2023 1:00 PM EDT
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