Tancredi, selected works 1954-1962

Introduction

Tancredi, Peggy Guggenheim’s favorite artist who helped to introduce him into overseas collections thanks to the solo exhibition dedicated to him in 1954 in Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice, is among the most important personalities of Italian pictorial abstraction matured in the context of fragmentation of the sign that it finds in Mark Tobey and Jean Paul Riopelle, some of its best-known interpreters.

A selection of works executed between 1954 and 1962 which document an intense decade punctuated by stays in Paris, Norway and Sweden, by meetings with leading personalities of the international avant-garde, including Dubuffet, Asger Jorn and Karel Appel, from exhibitions at the Saidenberg Gallery in New York, the Hannover Gallery in London, the Galleria Selecta in Rome and the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.

Among the works now proposed, the large canvas from 1954 which belonged to the musical composer Goffredo Petrassi is worth mentioning; the Marina veneziana of 1957 which belonged to the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice, to establish the close link with the lagoon city. The itinerary closes with some works from the series “Diario paesano” (Paesan Diary), already exhibited in 1968 at the Venice Biennale in the retrospective dedicated to the artist, collages painted with extraordinary levity and harmony interspersed with figurative inserts of floral subjects to suggest that desire for levity to part of the artist opposed to the gloom of the tragic epilogue of his existential story.