Eduarda Emilia Maino (Milan, 1930 – 2004).
She began painting in the early 1950s after completing a medical degree. In the early 1950s, she was drawn to painting and painted mostly flower vases as a self-taught artist. In 1957 she began frequenting the Giamaica bar, a hub of the Milanese avant-garde, where she met Piero Manzoni, with whom she established a deep friendship. Piero Manzoni personally introduced Eduarda to artistic avant-garde Milanese circles. The following year she adhered to the Milanese avant-garde and created her first substantial body of work, the Volume. She began her artistic career after seeing a Concetto Spaziale by Lucio Fontana exhibited. She punctured canvases that bear a solid reference for Fontana’s Spatialism. In 1959 she joined Azimuth alongside Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, and Piero Manzoni, which created international connections with Gruppo Zero in Germany, Gruppo Nulin in the Netherlands, and Gruppo Motus in France.
In 1961, she participated in a show in the Netherlands, where her name was mistakenly spelled as one word (Dada as a diminutive of Eduarda. The change of identity coincides with a far more critical renewal that leads the artist toward the perceptual dynamism of Programmed Art. In 1962, her work was featured in the major Nul group exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1962 she joined the Nouvelle Tendance movement alongside Getulio Alviani, Bruno Munari, Raphael Soto, and Enzo Mari. In 1963 she was invited by Giulio Carlo Argan to San Marino Biennale, and she was part of the show Nove Tendencije in Zagreb, a major retrospective dedicated to the movement. In 1963 she officially joined the GRAV Movement.
Dadamaino’s artistic inquiry of the first half of the decade focused on movement. In 1961 she created the Optical-Dynamic Objects, aluminum plates glued to a board that generates optical effects, giving the impression of a dynamic flow. In 1966 she created the Componibili series, small cut-out squares that, flowing along a nylon thread, create new combinations. In the second half of the sixties, she began the Ricerca del Colore in which she undertook a scrupulous analysis of the solar spectrum’s chromatic combinations.