Milan, 1930 – Milan, 2004

Dadamaino, pseudonym of Edoarda Emilia Maino, is an Italian artist who actively contributed through her works to the Milanese artistic avant-garde movements of the 1950s.

After an initial training at the medical university, Dadamaino approached painting as a self-taught artist in the early fifties and began frequenting the “Bar Jamaica”, the center of the Milanese avant-garde, where he met, among others, Piero Manzoni with whom he has a deep friendship.

In autumn 1959, influenced by Manzoni, Dadamaino’s criticism of Informal painting became more radical, questioning the profession of the “painter” and his traditional working tools.

In the collective exhibition The woman in contemporary art at the Brera Gallery in Milan, Dadamaino provocatively presents for the first time a Volume, a monochrome canvas characterized by a large ovoid gash with which he expresses the concept of the elimination of art in common with Manzoni .

The exhibition catalog does not present a reproduction of the work on display, but that of a previous work that is still significant; however, the “very perforated canvas” mentioned by Mario Monteverdi in the “Corriere lombardo” leaves no doubt about the presence of a Volume at the Brera Gallery, a few days before the group show at Azimuth.

In these years he began to frequent the protagonists of the “Group T” and the “Group N” and began to become interested in the results of kinetic and optical art. In 1961 he created the Rilievi, characterized by light-receptive materials, which, depending on the movement of the spectator, create plays of light and dark and optical suggestions of movement.

In the same year, inspired by Lucio Fontana, she founded the “Gruppo Punto” together with Antonio Calderara, Nanda Vigo, Kengiro Azuma, Hsiao Chin and LI Yuen-Chia.

In 1965 he joined the “Nouvelle Tendance” and began producing a series of works focused on the effects of vision and kinetics, called Optical-Dynamic Objects.