Conceived in 1913 and cast in 1972 Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space will come up at Christie’s in New York on November 11. It is the first time in nearly 50 years that one of the artist’s revolutionary sculptures has been offered at auction. The estimate is $3.8-4.5 million.
Max Carter, International Director, Head of Department, Impressionist and Modern Art, remarked: “In his brief life, Boccioni reimagined time, space and movement. Where other works of art are rooted in the past, Unique Forms of Continuity of Space – Boccioni’s greatest achievement and one of the most important sculptures of the 20th century – was, is and will always be the future.”
The architect Sir Norman Foster said of this piece that … it resonates across time. It even has a science fiction aspect—you can almost see Darth Vader [in it].” The work stands not only as the culmination of the artist’s pioneering form of Futurist sculpture, but as a powerful visual embodiment of the Futurists’ iconoclastic and revolutionary artistic aims. Boccioni has taken one of the most revered subjects in the Western tradition of art—the human figure—and split it apart before reconstructing it in a complex, abstract structure of dynamic, interlocking facets and graceful planes that penetrate and activate the space surrounding it. Striding boldly forward it presents a new conception of man, as well as sculpture, in the 20th-century: mechanical, forward moving and entirely modern.
