Enio Iommi

His elder brother, Claudio Girola, was delivered in 1923 and Nidia, his sister, in 1929.

Claudio and Enio grew up around their father's workshop and learned the craft of sculpture while they submerged themselves into an environment soaking in artistic culture.

Enio Iommi (March 20, 1926 – May 13, 2013) was an Argentinian visual artist who was particularly well known for his work as a concrete sculptor.

Enio Iommi was born on March 20, 1926, in Rosario to the Italian sculptor Santiago Girola and the also Italian modiste María Iommi (the trade of a fashion designer for nowadays standards).

In 1939, as a consequence of the 30s’ economic crisis, the Girolas moved to Buenos Aires.

Still in his teens, Enio is introduced by his brother Claudio and his uncle Godofredo Iommi (the elder brother of their mother) to a group of young artists with whom he began to frequent and exchanged ideas about avant-garde art.

At the beginning of the 40s, these young poets and painters rebelled against traditional Figurativism –the mainstream current in Argentina.

Together they formed a spearhead ready to revamp it.

Claudio Girola, Alfredo Hlito, Tomás Maldonado, Edgar Bayley, Gyula Kosice, Rod Rothfuss, Arde Quin and others got together at Rubí bar, in front of Miserere Square.

They were interested in the information, available albeit scarce in the city, about the Russian Constructivism and the Dutch De Stijl.

Two groups of artists emerged from those gatherings that led the way across the path of Modern Art in Argentina: Concrete-Invention Art Association (in Spanish, Asociación Arte Concreto Invención) and Madí Arts (Arte Madí).

Both rejected figuration and representation, to which they opposed the invention.

In other words, the creation in a pure sense.

The ultimate abstraction.

A visual morphology not addressing anything in particular.

These ideas were later developed in the Arturo magazine, whose single issue appeared in 1944.

Given Enio's young age, he is first a spectator, but quickly became an active member of the Concrete-Invention group, giving birth to his first painting over a linoleum sheet that same year.

The following year, the artist took his first step into sculpture with Opposite Directions, a work of great formal maturity despite being a debut piece.

The members of the Concrete-Invention Art Association showcased their first public exhibition in the Peuser art salon, located in Florida street.

Among the participants were Claudio Girola, Tomás Maldonado, the Lozza brothers, Alberto Molemberg, Primaldo Mónaco, Nuñez, Liddi Prati, Jorge Souza and Enio, who took his mother's last name – Iommi– as his alias to distinguish himself from his brother.

The traditional art circles and part of the press replied negatively to the cutting-edge proposal of the Geometric art.

Without giving up, the members of the association met every Saturday to discuss new concepts.

Enio Iommi drew visual sustenance from artists such as Max Bill and Georges Vantorgerloo.

It seems that the sculpture Torn Circles is opposing to the theoretical bases of the Constructivism and, as the titles announces, it foreshadows one trait of his work: to sever from models that begin to suffocate his desire to explore new horizons.

In 1946 he co-founded the avant-garde Concrete-Invention art movement, which was Argentine branch of the larger concrete art movement.

They continued presenting group expositions until 1950, when the association disbanded.

Due to the initiative of the critic Aldo Pellegrini, another crew was formed under the name of Modern Artists of Argentina (in Spanish, Artistas Modernos de la Argentina), which flocked together independent Abstract and Concrete Art sculptors and painters.

Maldonado, Hlito, Iommi, Sarah Grilo, Fernandez Muro, Ocampo, Aebi and Claudio Girola staged collective shows in Viau and Krayd galleries.

Also, in the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, where they applied pioneering museological criteria.

In 1953, Enio Iommi met Susana Schneider, a young polyglot Argentinian woman of French-Swiss descent, to whom he married three years later and who played a decisive role in the development of his career as an artist.

That same year, he was invited to work on a sculpture for what is now known as Casa Curuchet, designed by the architect Le Corbusier.

The Modern Artists chose separate individual ways in 1955 and abandoned their activities as a group.

Claudio Girola and Godofredo Iommi migrated to Chile.

After his wedding, Enio moved his workshop to Morón district for two years before settling permanently in Palomar.

In this period, he initiated collaboration with the Austrian architect Herman Loos, for whom he designed decorative items –an activity that enabled him to secure his livelihood whereas he continued to produce his personal work, which took a new direction.

Without discarding Geometry, the new sculptures based on simple shapes as circles, squares, triangles and ellipses were more expressive.

Enio Iommi began to feel choked with the Concrete art principles.

On metal surfaces, he performed cuts, that deconstructed the initial plane in order to form new virtual volumes and create the space.

This period, that the art critic López Anaya refers as “Baroque” stretched out for 25 years, during which Enio Iommi asserted his identity as a Modern sculptor.

1957 was a year marked by the arrival of his daughter Claudia, followed by his son Rafael in 1964.