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ISOLATION

Little Pink Horse
In the post-war years, Sassu, despite the support of the gallerist Cairola, did not participate either in the Nuova Secessione, whose manifesto is dated 1 October 1946, or the subsequent Fronte nuovo delle Arti, concluded in 1948, promoted by Renato Birolli and Emilio Vedova.

In effect, his painting production was quite distant from the Picassian neo-Cubism which, albeit modified and interpreted in varying ways, constituted an example of renewal for many other artists. This created a situation of isolation for the artist, who looked for new spaces and new means of expression.
THE PERIOD 1948-61

Cyclist
After a failed attempt to set up his own ceramics studio in Val Ganna, which ended in 1947, he settled in Albisola. In this town in Liguria, where he re-established contact with his friend Tullio Mazzotti who allowed him to use his own ceramics factory, Sassu began a long period of work, going from 1948 to 1960-61.

Among the other artists working there in this same period were Fontana, Agenore Fabbri, Angelo Del Bon, and later Roberto Crippa, Enrico Baj, Sergio Dangelo, Wildredo Lam, as well as members of the Cobra group: Asger Jorn, Guillaume Corneille, and Karel Appel. Some of these are represented in the mural Cronache di Albisola, painted in oils in 1948 and since dismantled.
top of page DIVERSIFIED ACTIVITY
Sassu, Fontana, and Fabbri, thanks to their architect friend Osvaldo Borsari, obtained numerous orders for objects for home furnishings like ceramic handles, plates, and small decorative sculptures.

His stay in Albisola gave Sassu the opportunity to carry out an extremely diversified artistic activity: he made ceramic works, in which the theme of the horse prevailed; resumed his experiments with sculpture, begun with the Cyclist of 1939, where he united the sense of the malleability of the material with his unending research into the concreteness of things and figures in space; and in the sphere of painting he continued his effort, begun in the 1930s, to work out a personal language attentive both to contemporary reality and to myth.