Vincenzo Agnetti (Milan 1926 – 1981), artist, writer, poet, protagonist of Italian Conceptual Art.

A graduate of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, he made his debut in the late 1950s, combining painting in the informal sphere with his work as a critic, essayist and theorist. In 1957 he collaborated on “Azimuth” and the magazine of the same name. From 1960 he radicalized the conceptual scope of his operation, moving away from painting and identifying art with absence and with a radical analytical practice aimed at the pure examination of concepts. In 1967 he had his first solo show at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, where he exhibited Principia, a work that hinged on the relativity of meanings in language. The following year he presented the famous Macchina Drogata, an Olivetti Divisumma 14 calculator whose numbers were replaced by letters of the alphabet, so that words became the result of mathematical operations. His work of analysis of the object in relation to its physical and mental image, as well as his work on the languages ​​of communication, will be, even in subsequent years, of fundamental importance.

Among the exhibitions and reviews in which he participated, we recall: numerous editions of the Biennale di Venezia (1974, 1976, 1978, 1980); Documenta 5, (1972); la Quadriennale di Roma (1972); la Biennale di S. Paolo (1973); Vincenzo Agnetti. Retrospective (1967-1980), Mart, Rovereto (2008); Vincenzo Agnetti. L’operAzione Concettuale, Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea, Foligno (2012); A proposito di Vincenzo Agnetti, Museo D’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genoa (2013); Vincenzo Agnetti. Works from Private Collections, Matteo Lampertico Arte Antica e Moderna, Milan (2014); Testimony, Galleria Il Ponte, Florence (2015); Vincenzo Agnetti, Palazzo Serbelloni, Milan (2016); Vincenzo Agnetti – The Lost Letter, Agnetti Archive, Milan (2016); Giorgio Morandi/Vincenzo Agnetti, Difference and Repetition, Palazzo De Sanctis, Teramo (2016); Agnetti. A hundred years from now, Palazzo Reale, Milan (2017); Vincenzo Agnetti. Beyond Language, Osart Gallery, Milan (2017); Unfinished culture #2, Fondazione Brodbeck, Catania (2017); Equivalence – Meditation, Archivio Vincenzo Agnetti, Milan (2017); Vincenzo Agnetti: Territories, Lévy Gorvy, London/New York (2017); Solo. Vincenzo Agnetti, Museo del Novecento, Florence (2019); Vincenzo Agnetti. NEG: playing the pauses, Padiglione de l’Esprit Nouveau, Bologna (2019); Vincenzo Agnetti, GAM, Turin (2022); Tempo e Memoria, Galleria Cardi, Milan/London (2023); “Practically nothing to sell”, MAMbo, Bologna (2024); Vincenzo Agnetti and Tommaso Binga: a machine is a machine, Galleria Erica Ravenna, Rome (2024).