Dadamaino

Eduarda Emilia Maino, known in art as Dadamaino, was born on 2nd October 1930 in Milan. After studying a classical education she enrolled at the faculty of medicine, but despite earning her degree she never practised in the profession. Vivacious, restless and inquisitive, at the beginning of the Fifties she moved, self-taught, towards the world of art. She began to frequent the Bar Jamaica in Brera, known as the “Artist’s cafe” a place where Milan’s artists and intellectuals of the time met and mixed. It was here that she met Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani, and Agostino Bonalumi, with who in 1959 she started the Azimuth magazine and the gallery with the same name, theoretically akin to

the contemporary European groups (the Zero Group in Germany, the Nul group in Holland, and the Motus group in France). These were the years when she began to take part in solo and collective exhibitions, and when she was profoundly affected by the work of Lucio Fontana. Following Fontana’s example she began the creation of the famous “Volumi” series: canvases left untreated or carefully painted with tempera in monochromatic tones (white, blue, black), which with methodical precision she covered with elliptical holes that open large ovoid rips in space. Dadamaino died in Milan on 13th April 2004.