Edmondo Bacci

Edmondo Bacci was born in Venice in 1913. From 1932 to 1937 attended the Venice Academy of Fine Arts, a student of Virgilio Guidi and Guido Cadorin. Since 1934 Bacci participated in the collective exhibitions of the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa and in the initiatives organized at the Piccola Galleria in Venice, where the avant-garde artists of the moment found hospitality. In these years he began a friedship with gallery owner Carlo Cardazzo who, with his brother Renato, directed the Galleria del Cavallino. It was Cardazzo in May 1945 who hosted his first solo exhibition. Marghera, the focal point of the post-war economic rebirth, and the suggestions offered by the light of the lagoon filtered by the metal sheets and fumes from the smokestacks, are the inspirations that Bacci transfers to “Cantieri” and “Fabbriche,” works executed around 1950, in which the artist matures the spatial function of color destined to become the protagonist in his later works. His first participation in the Venice Biennale was in 1948, where Edmondo Bacci would return consistently until 1958, the year of his solo show.
In 1952 the Cavallino Gallery hosted the first manifestations of the Venetian Spatialism group, a movement that Bacci would join in September 1953.
The pictorial reflections of the moment saw the gradual abandonment of the sign and structure already peculiar to the “Factories” to give way to a new expressive intensity of color that would lead the artist to create the cycles of the “Events” and the “Dawns.”
In the mid-1950s Edmondo Bacci met Peggy Guggenheim, Tancredi's collector as well as a friend of Giuseppe Santomaso and Emilio Vedova, who would become his fervent supporter. After his exhibition at the Galleria del Cavallino in 1956, the following year he held an important solo show in the United States, at the Seventy-Five Gallery in New York at which numerous works entered important American collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. He then participates in various space movement group shows, including Espacialismo at Galeria Bonino in Buenos Aires in 1956.
Nel In 1957 Edmondo Bacci exhibited at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, at the Galleria d'Arte Selecta in Rome; he also participated in the exhibition Between Space and Earth at the Marlborough Gallery in London. Later he participated in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States: in 1961 at the Drian Gallery in London and Galerie 59 in Aschaffenburg, Germany; in 1962 at the Frank Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills; in 1963 at the Neue Galerie in Graz. The following year he appeared at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London. Between 1965 and 1966 Bacci exhibited at the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, and at the headquarters of the Renaissance Society, Chicago. In 1974 Edmondo Bacci obtained the chair of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Venice, which he held until his death. Of importance is the 2023 anthological exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.