Baj Enrico

Enrico Baj was born to two engineers: Angelo Baj, a Milanese of a lineage of builders, and Maria Luisa Rastelli, a pioneer from Parma among the first women to graduate from the Polytechnic of Milan. An upbringing with a ruler and compass at home, yet he chose a decidedly more anarchic path.

After attending Liceo Berchet, he began studying Medicine at the University of Milan, but soon abandoned his studies to pursue Law (graduating and becoming a lawyer) and, concurrently, attended the Brera Academy. A classic example of an artist who cannot remain on a singular path.

Baj was a friend and collaborator of an impressive number of brilliant minds: André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Queneau, Edoardo Sanguineti, Umberto Eco, and many others. He illustrated books, wrote essays, and published several volumes, including Patafisica (1982), the Automitobiografia (1983) and Ecologia dell’arte. He demonstrated that one can be a serious painter without taking oneself too seriously.

In 1951 he held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria San Fedele in Milan and, along with Sergio Dangelo, founded the Nuclear Painting Movement. Two years later, with Asger Jorn, he established the Movement for an Imaginary Bauhaus, a sort of ironic slap to the “official” Bauhaus of Max Bill. In 1954, he organised the International Ceramics Meetings in Albissola Marina, gathering names such as Lucio Fontana, Karel Appel, Roberto Matta, and other artistic mavericks.

During the 1950s, he contributed to avant-garde magazines Il Gesto, Boa and Phases. He signed the manifesto Contro lo stile (1957), adhered to the Manifeste de Naples and became a member of the Collège de ’Pataphysique. In 1962 in New York, during the exhibition The Art of Assemblage, he met Marcel Duchamp in person. He participated in the Venice Biennale (with a personal room in 1964) and the Milan Triennale.

Always sensitive to social context, in 1972 he created the large painting The Funerals of the Anarchist Pinelli (or, as he preferred to call it, The Assassination of the Anarchist Pinelli), a powerful and grotesque work inspired by Guernica. After decades of peregrinations, the work has finally returned to Milan and from 2025 will be permanently exhibited at the Museum of the Nineteenth Century.

Married to Roberta Cerini, with whom he had four children (Angelo, Andrea, Pietro and Marianna), Baj remained, until the end, a free spirit, ironic and politically inconvenient. His sculpture The Chessmen remains today the official logo of the San Giorgio tournament in Legnano, and he granted the rights for free out of pure friendship.

His Artistic Thought

Baj traversed and contaminated some of the most vital movements of the twentieth century: Nuclear, Nouveau Réalisme, Surrealism and above all Patafisica, the science of imaginary solutions.

“Forms disintegrate: the new forms of man are those of the atomic universe…”

With this belief, he disintegrated, reassembled and mocked the modern world. He used wood, fabrics, buttons, medals, pipes, Meccano and anything that came to hand. He created grotesque figures, pompous generals, monstrous ladies, and robotic creatures, denouncing with dark humour the robotisation of man, the fetishism of technology and the stupidity of power.

His Modifications, material collages, the Ties, and the large three-dimensional constructions (such as The Apocalypse of 1978) show an artist mixing Dadaism, Surrealism, and the disillusioning spirit of Alfred Jarry. An art that does not merely represent reality, but deconstructs it, ridicules it, and reassembles it in a monstrously amusing manner.