Enrico Baj’s Niam-Niam, No. 19 belongs to a key body of work from the late 1950s and early 1960s in which the artist invented a cast of grotesque, hybrid figures known as the “Niam-Niam.” These works mark Baj’s turn toward satire and caricature as potent tools for confronting authority, militarism, and the self-importance of modern institutions. At once playful and unsettling, the Niam-Niam figures function as exaggerated stand-ins for systems of power rather than as individual portraits. Baj emerged in postwar Italy amid widespread disillusionment with the rationalist ideals that had underpinned Fascism and failed to prevent the devastation of World War II. As a founding member of the Nuclear Art Movement in the early 1950s, he rejected harmony and order in favor of chaos, irony, and deliberate irrationality.



Enrico Baj’s Niam-Niam paintings—sometimes translated as the “gross eaters” or “big eaters”—occupy a central place in his satirical critique of power in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The term niam-niam, an expression associated with voracious eating, immediately signals excess and appetite. Baj uses this idea metaphorically to describe figures that consume—resources, authority, attention, even other people—without restraint. Baj developed the Niam-Niam imagery in the wake of World War II and during the Cold War, a period defined by moral exhaustion and fear of technological annihilation. As a founder of the Nuclear Art Movement, he rejected rationalist ideals and heroic modernism, instead embracing irony, chaos, and nonsense as truthful responses to a damaged world.The Niam-Niam are typically depicted as grotesque, frontal figures with swollen eyes, gaping mouths, and exaggerated bodies. Their anatomy appears assembled rather than drawn, echoing Baj’s frequent use of collage and his interest in artificial construction.



Ultimately, the Niam-Niam paintings assert Baj’s belief that ridicule is a form of resistance. By

portraying power as gluttonous, theatrical, and fundamentally ridiculous, Baj dismantles its authority,

reminding viewers that what appears imposing may in fact be hollow and dangerously hungry.