Salvatore Scarpitta: 1956–64 (2016–17) brought together early works by the Italian-American artist (1919–2007), whose long career spanned non-objective abstraction, radical realism, and car racing in an oeuvre that achieved a distinctive mixture of material daring and tenderness. The exhibition spotlighted a pivotal period of transformation, beginning with Scarpitta’s forays into shaped and bandaged paintings, initiated just before his 1958 return from Rome to his native United States. It concluded with his shift from the canvas toward constructing racecars in 1964—the culmination of his deep-seated belief in movement as metaphor for life.

Salvatore Scarpitta: 1956–64 traced two seemingly incongruous trajectories. The artist’s works in these years moved along a discernibly linear path of formal growth from abstract wrapped canvases to painterly assemblages incorporating automotive parts. At the same time, Scarpitta’s course was a recursive one of multiple intersections, junctures, and syntheses. The exhibition revealed—and reveled in—Scarpitta’s unique ability to exploit the unresolvable tensions between injury and regeneration, the technological and the organic, materialism and myth, a future-oriented optimism and a lingering pessimism, in works of great beauty, sorrow, and wit.

Upon resettling in New York, Scarpitta was influenced by the omnipresence of Pop and its leading practitioners who congregated around Castelli Gallery and his new urban surroundings. Inspired by the American practice of taping an “X” on the windows of buildings slated for demolition, Scarpitta employed the cruciform to reorient the rectangular canvas in a series of works known as the X frames, produced largely between 1959 and 1961. As evidenced in X Member (1961), a centralized crossing warns of impending danger while connoting redemptive potential.

Salvatore Scarpitta: 1956–64 concludes on the brink of yet another transition: after 1964, Scarpitta would leave the canvas behind, turning instead to sculptural constructions of reassembled racecars and sleds, life-size and often functional. By tracing his development up to that point, the exhibition at Luxembourg & Dayan confirms that a practice of maintaining seeming opposites in perpetual suspension—be they material processes, significations, or cultural worlds—resides at the heart of his oeuvre.