Emilio Vedova was born in Venice on 9 August 1919. Between 1930 and 1935 he worked as a factory worker, with a photographer and with a restorer, as an artist he mainly was an autodidact. The years between 1936 and 1941 were shaped by stays in Rome, Florence and Bolzano. In 1942 Vedova joined the Italian anti-fascistic movement ‚Corrente'. In 1946 he wrote together with other artists the manifesto ‚Beyond Guernica'. That very same year Emilio Vedova was the co-founder of the ‚Fronte Nuove delle Arti', a group of young Italian artists, who wanted to renew Italian art based on their common anti-fascistic background. The group's collective appearance at the Biennale in Venice in 1948 belied only for a short time the different artistic concepts in the group, which included on the one side tendencies to abstraction and on the other side to realism. Vedova decided in favour of abstraction. After a period, which was dominated by geometrical forms, he turned to a passionate gestic informel painting between 1950 and 1953. Vedova often worked in cycles. During the second half of the 1950s Vedova tried to overcome the barriers of painting in various experiments and to open it to new media. At the beginning of the 1960s Emilio Vedova broke up the square form of paintings, the so-called ‚Plurimo-paintings came into existence. These were folded up or shut spatial frames of wooden boards with iron hinges, painted on all sides and finished with various techniques. Vedova spent the years 1964/65 in Berlin in the course of the program ‚Artists in Residence'. In 1955, 1959 and 1982 Vedova participated in the documenta. In 1960 Vedova's paintings were shown in an own room at the 30th Biennale in Venice and he received the ‚Grand Prize'. The Museo Correr in Venice showed a retrospective of 280 works in 1984, followed by another one at the Bayrische Staatsgemäldesammlung in Munich in 1986.
Emilio Vedova is regarded as one of the main representatives of Italian Informel painting in the 1950s and 1960s.