FINE ART Contemporary Sculpture IOMMI 79 / Signed / Bronze Piece

Born into a family of artists (both his father, Santiago Girola, and his brother, Claudio Girola, were sculptors), Enio Iommi began practicing sculpture in his father's workshop in 1936. In 1937, he studied drawing at Enrico Forni's studio in Buenos Aires.

Iommi was part of the generation of artists who introduced the avant-garde to Latin America. In 1946, he was a founder of the Arte Concreto-Invención group, whose aesthetic concerns were exclusively with forms, shapes, and colors, dissociated from any kind of figuration or representation of reality. His works from this period were executed in stainless steel, aluminum, wood, bronze, and acrylics. From 1977, he radically changed his style, producing assemblages and installations as a way to critique the country's government, the military junta.

After 2001, Iommi shifted toward a style free of complexities and produced works of a humorous nature, by finding new functions and uses for everyday objects. Iommi exhibited in 1989 at the Hayward Gallery in London in the show Art in Latin America; in 1990 at the Arte Concreto-Invención/Arte Madí 1945-1970 exhibition held at the Museum of Constructive Art in Zurich; and in the traveling exhibition Latin American Artists of the 20th Century, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2003, an anthological one-man show was held in his hometown of Rosario.