Edmondo Bacci

A selection of paintings from the early 1950s by Edmondo Bacci will be presented at the Galleria dello Scudo from September 28. Bacci was a member of the small circle of artistic excellence active in Venice in the post-war period and was undoubtedly one of the few artists in the Italian scene to have reworked the expressive potential of abstraction well in advance, filtered through new trends from Europe and the United States.

The exhibition presents the most lyrical phase of Bacci’s work, when the artist, already well-established in the exhibition environments linked to Spatialism and among the most innovative contemporary interpreters at a national level, was noticed by Peggy Guggenheim. And it was precisely the well-known American collector who turned her attention to Bacci, promoting his entry into important public and private collections overseas and acquiring six works dated between 1950 and 1962 for her own collection. In 1956 Alfred H. Barr Jr purchased the large canvas Avvenimento 13 R / Incident 13 R from 1953 for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The generative force of color, the breaking of spatial planes and the primary function attributed to a singular research into light are some of the distinctive elements of a language that between 1950 and 1955 came to reinterpret in an abstract way the factories, the industrial suburbs, or rather the places that had become symbols of modernity and emblems of that economic development destined to mark, for at least a decade, the phase of great rebirth of the country after the post-war reconstruction.