Italo Scanga

Italo Scanga (June 6, 1932 - July 7, 2001), an Italian-born American artist, was known for his sculptures, prints and, paintings, mostly created from found objects.

Italo Scanga was an innovative neo-Dadaist, neo-Expressionist, and neo-Cubist multimedia artist who made sculptures of ordinary objects and created prints, glass, and ceramic works.

Mr. Scanga's materials included natural objects like branches and seashells, as well as kitsch figurines, castoff musical instruments and decorative trinkets salvaged from flea markets and thrift shops. He combined these ingredients into free-standing assemblages, which he then painted. Although visually ebullient, the results sometimes referred to gruesome episodes from Greek mythology or the lives and deaths of martyred saints.

He considered his artistic influences to be sweepingly pan-cultural, from African sculpture to Giorgio de Chirico. He often collaborated with the sculptor Dale Chihuly, who was a close friend.

Myths had always fascinated Italo Scanga. Many of his sculptures translate written or oral narratives into the realm of visual objects. Constructed of wood and glass, found objects or fabric, his ensembles reflect a trio of activities—working, eating, and praying. These activities dominate the lives of those who live close to the land, but they are also activities that are idealized by many who contemplate, romantically, a simpler, bucolic life.

Scanga—through a vocabulary of basic tools, icons, and foodstuffs, reworked in a very personal way—attempts to restore the original sense of the peasant world: the realities of hard work or religious devotion, often ameliorated by civilized sentimentality. He invokes myths to give us the essentials of such a cultural experience.

While there is no single source for Scanga's work, many of the stories, traditions, and superstitions retold in through adumbrated saints and basketed scythes are native to the folk-life of southern Italy. This culture, inhabiting the time-worn Calabrian countryside of Scanga's native land, provides the artist with his most consistent and powerful source material.

Whether religious or secular in content, Scanga's works of the past decade are the artist's reflections on the immutable, universal aspects of peasant life. Some, like the series of Italian photographs, are intensely personal, while others use a more generally recognized set of images—old farm tools, wooden bowls or large plaster statues of Saint Joseph and the Madonna. They are all, however, Scanga's own reinterpretation of those universals, his personal memories and thoughts commingled and then frozen for his audience to contemplate.

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