BICE LAZZARI Fra spazio e misura Ca' Pesaro Museum

Bice Lazzari. Fra spazio e misura is a small but valuable survey of Bice Lazzari's painting in the period of transition from Informal to Abstract Minimalism between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s. An isolated and solitary figure, Bice Lazzari (Venice 1900 - Rome 1981) was born into a solid bourgeois family of entrepreneurs and architects. In 1916, she enrolled at the Accademia di Belle... Show more

Bice Lazzari. Fra spazio e misura is a small but valuable survey of Bice Lazzari's painting in the period of transition from Informal to Abstract Minimalism between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s. An isolated and solitary figure, Bice Lazzari (Venice 1900 - Rome 1981) was born into a solid bourgeois family of entrepreneurs and architects. In 1916, she enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, where she took courses in decoration and not painting because they were not considered suitable for 'a young lady from a good family' due to the nude lessons. From the second half of the 1920s, she worked as an artist in the applied arts sector, at the time one of the few possible professional outlets for a female artist who wanted the freedom to live off her work without having to depend on family finances. In that field - rich in innovation and open to stylistic experimentation - she had the freedom to interpret and study the non-figurative orientations and developments of modern decorative arts. For Bice Lazzari, until the end of the 1930s, abstraction was not yet an intellectually and programmatically conscious choice aimed at defining a break with tradition, but rather the decidedly avant-garde product of modern and functional furnishing, refined but still decorative. In 1935 Bice Lazzari moved to Rome where she continued her fruitful collaboration with the leading architects and decorators of the time. It was only after the war, in 1949, that she picked up her paintbrushes again and returned to concentrating on her painting practice, free from commission. His works from the 1950s are one of the best examples of Italian 'material' painting. From 1959 onwards, Lazzari's painting became totally materialistic thanks to the use of new materials such as glues, sands and mixed tempera. Between 1970 and 1971, Bice Lazzari began to work exclusively with the more fluid and brilliant acrylic technique. Her most successful abstract works date from this last decade in a research that began in the mid-1920s. The sign is obsessively and rhythmically repeated on the monochrome canvas and the compositional grid, despite its bare geometric simplicity, retains a unique and original lyrical inspiration. These works of his maturity are perfect formal balances in which the sign rhythmically punctuates the field of the canvas, imprisoning the viewer's eye in the relationship between space, time and measure. The exhibition, realised with the scientific support of the Archivio Bice Lazzari, presents about ten canvases and about thirty drawings from the Archivio Lazzari in Rome, from private collections and from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.