Generale, 1961

Enrico Baj was an artist whose work spanned a number of fields, including printing, sculpture and painting – Baj was heavily associated with both the surrealist and dada movement; he was also involved with the CoBrA movement and worked alongside fellow progressive artists such as Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp and the novelist, Umberto Eco. Alongside Asger Jorn, Baj founded the Movimento Nucleare – a reaction from various artists to the use of nuclear power - following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Unlike abstract art, this movement was blatantly political; Baj had a long-standing disdain for the militarism of the time and rejected the authorities that ruled – a lot of his early work openly criticised current political affairs. Among his best-known outputs is Generals, a series of bizarre characters that have been made from various found objects including medals and belts.