the great beautyof Venice

the great beautyof Venice

GR gallery255 Bowery, 10002 New YorkNovember 18, 2016 - February 05, 2017

curated by:

Giovanni Granzotto

Conceived and realized by:

www.gr-gallery.com

Press office and communications:

Open Gate Communications

Coordinated by:

Alberto PasiniEva Zanardi

Photograph credit:

Archivio Studio d’Arte G.R.Marco Monti

Transport:

Insurance:

Graphic design:

Serena Chies

Finito di stamparenel mese di novembre 2016

presso le Grafiche De BastianiGodega di Sant’Urbano - TV© Dario De Bastiani Editore,

Vittorio Veneto 2016ISBN 978-88-8466-515-7

Translation:

Giovanna Zuddas

A special thanks to:

Enrico BollaPaolo CovreUgo GranzottoAntonio, Fiorenzo, Gasparee Giancarlo LucchettaBarbara MorandisFlavia e Gianni Pasini

Our thanks also go to:

Duilio Dal FabbroEnrico Contini Maria Pia MorassiMaria Lucia FabioYuli HuangFrancesco ScipioniTatsuto ShibataEzio Trentin

ThE rEASoNFor “ThE GrEAT BEAuTy oF VENIcE”by Giovanni Granzotto

“ThE GrEAT BEAuTy oF VENIcE”AT GR GALLERY

by Eva Zanardi

ART WORkS

Ennio Finzi

Virgilio Guidi

Riccardo Licata

Gino Morandis

Emilio Vedova

Carmelo Zotti

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The ReasoN FoR “The GReaT BeauTY oF VeNice”

We have decided to entitle this exhibition “the great beauty of Venice” to celebrate Venice in the States, but also to offer New York’s public an authentic, true vision of what happened in the world of Art in the after war. Beyond the cinematographic suggestions, the global Art sys-tem has not passed through Rome, but through Venice, as well as through Paris: first of all through the Biennale, then even through the many public institutions such as Ca’ Pesaro, the Bevilacqua, the Masa, the Correr Museum, etc. Besides, innu-merable private structures stimulated and cultivated for some decades the cultural ferments of the Venetian lagoon, first among everything the Guggenheim Foundation. Peggy Guggenheim came ashore in Venice and the town be-came the true laboratory of contemporary art. And so, trying to represent her, we have chosen six artists who were extremely important in the ‘50s and ‘60s and who contin-ued to work with undiminished creativity through all their ca-reer, some of them even until nowadays.Emilio Vedova’s powerful gesture, Riccardo Licata’s arcane and narrative sign, Virgilio Guidi’s plastic brightness, Ennio Finzi’s thunderous colour, Carmelo Zotti’s embrace with myth and Gino Morandis’s spatial atmospheres will guide the spectator to rediscover the magic of the lagoon town.

Giovanni Granzotto

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GR gallery, inaugurated in January 2016, has already found its own niche in the ebullient yet discerning contemporary art pan-orama of New York City. With an extraordinary international and local press coverage of approximately six articles per exhibition GR gallery, located at 255 Bowery, is now a force to be reckoned with in the Lower East Side contemporary art gallery scenery. GR gallery, the US branch of the established Studio d’Arte GR of Sacile Italy, presented its 2016 north American program by featuring a series of successful exhibitions focusing mainly on Op, Kinetic and Minimalist art, headlining, among others, Italian and American artist such as Alberto Biasi, Franco Costalonga, Emilio Cavallini and David R. Prentice. GR gallery wraps up its first year’s accomplishments with a group exhibition called “The Great Beauty of Venice”. Through an explicit reference in the title to the Italian movie winner at the 86th Academy  Award, “The Great Beauty of Venice” aims to explore the intimate re-lationship established over the years between Studio d’Arte GR and the artists and art movements that gravitated around and drew inspiration from the “City On The Lagoon”. This exhibition is on view from November 18, 2016 to Febru-ary 5, 2017 and has been curated by the art-critic and Studio d’Arte GR founder Giovanni Granzotto. It will collectively display thirty works from artists: Gino Morandis (1915-1994) Virgilio Guidi (1891-1984), Ennio Finzi (1930), Riccardo Licata (1929-2014), Carmelo Zotti (1933 – 2007) and Emilio Vedova (1919-2006). Titled, “The Great Beauty of Venice” the exhibition will be

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focused on the art movement known as, Venetian Spatialism which developed in the early ‘50s and of whom Peggy Guggen-heim was its major patron. Venetian Spatialism, a branch of Lu-cio Fontana’s Spatialism Movement, inspects the relationship between art and physical space, and investigates the dialogue between empiricism and technology. Artists in Italy’s Veneto Region quickly embraced this new, trailblazing art movement intended to synthesize colour, sound, space, movement and time into a new pictorial style. Among the artist featured in the exhibition are Gino Morandis and Virgilio Guidi. Both were men-tioned in two of Fontana’s Spatialism Manifestos as true pro-tagonists of the movement whereas artists, Ennio Finzi and Riccardo Licata were stated as embracing the Movement’s cre-ative guidelines but never actually fully adhering to them . Also featured in the exhibition are the surrealist/symbolist painter Carmelo Zotti and the absolute master of the post-war Italian Arte Informale movement, the Venetian Emilio Vedova, who both gravitated around and were inspired by the effervescent Venetian artistic landscape of the time.Through their diverse yet congenial styles, the selected art-works featured in “The Great Beauty of Venice” will immerse the viewer in an atmosphere of spatial calm, harmonious cosmic rigour and imperturbable serenity within infinite space.

by Eva ZanardiHead of Communication

for GR gallery, Art Advisor

art Works

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After attending courses for a brief period at the Institute of Art in Ven-ice, he became attracted to the cubist structural disarrangement, which allowed him to transcend the representation of given reality. After the 1948 Biennale, the Historic Archives of the Contemporary Arts in Venice reopened, offering Finzi the chance to dedicate himself to the study of masters of avant-garde movements in history. The discov-ery of dodecaphonic music led Finzi to seize the principle of “dis-sonance”. The “coloursound” rela-tionship, a colour that Finzi loved to “listen to” more than “to see” in its most intimate resonance, al-lowed him to express himself freely under different rules. At the end of the 1950s, the turbulence and

expressive urgency of Finzi’s work became calm and expressed a more reflective dimension. It was the path of superseding painting itself and moving closer to gestalt theories on the phenomenology of perception. Until 1978 the prin-ciples of optical art informed his research on optical effects, due to the phenomenon of the retinal con-servation of images. After a short crisis, painting became dominant again, with colour and non-colour, light and shade, successively alter-nating and competing on the sur-face of the work. Black was used as the light of the dark, of empti-ness, of silence, and led him to probe the most secret resonance of non-existence in the invisibility itself, In the continuing dialectics

that distinguishes the principle of his research. This incessant ques-tioning of working style makes him foreign to any preconceived stylis-tic form and gives him the profes-sional label of “non-style”: through the experience of experience, Finzi continually follows the dream of surprise in painting, with a stress

on constant regeneration and ca-tharsis. In more recent years he re-takes connotations that are rooted in painting and colour, but these connotations are no longer inhibit-ed by ideologically closed regimes; the artist retakes with an abandon that is completely open and avail-able to the totality of feeling.

Ennio Finzi(Venice, 1931)

Invenzione, 1953, oil on board, 50,7x46.5 in.

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Figure cromatiche, 1956, oil on board, 47.2 x 39.7 in. Cromo vibrazione luce bianco rosso, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 39.3 x 39.3 in.

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Scale transcromatiche, 1978, acrylic on canvas, cm. 65x65, 25,5x25,5 in. Scale transcromatiche, 1978,acrylic on canvas, cm. 65x65, 25,5x25,5 in

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Scala cromatica, 1982, acrilyc on cardboard, cm. 27.5 x 39.3 in. Il Verso, 1990, acrylic on canvas, cm. 59.5 x 39.3 in

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Virgilio Guidi(Rome, 1891 - Venice, 1984)

Virgilio Guidi, a geometry and draw-ing enthusiast, attended the Tech-nical Institute in Rome; to further cultivate his passion for drawing the artist attended evening class-es at the Scuola Libera di Pittura (School of Painting). A few years later, in 1911 he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. In 1915 he participated in the III International Art Exhibition of The Roman Secession. Between 1920 and ‘23 he painted some of his most important paintings of his por-traits series which were featured at

the XIII Venice Biennale in 1922. In those years Guidi mingled with “third room” artistic crowd of the renown Caffè Aragno where he met painter Giorgio De Chirico, poet Gi-useppe Ungaretti and art historian Roberto Longhi. In 1924 Guidi fi-nally achieved critical success at the XIV Biennial of Venice with his painting “Tram” (Streetcar). The unanimous favorable opinion of art critics brings the artist interna-tional recognition so that the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg offers to buy “Tram”, but Guidi chooses for it to

remain in Italy (now at the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome). In 1926 the artist participated in the first edi-tion of the exhibition “Novecento Italiano” (Italian Twentieth Century Art Movement)” in Milan, at the Palazzo della Permanente. He con-sequently took part in its second edition, in 1929, while retaining a degree of autonomy with respect to that trend (Novecento Italiano). In 1935, Guidi moved to Bologna, where he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts; during the same year the artist was rewarded at the Sec-

ond Quadrennial of National Art in Rome with a full section of the exhibition dedicated to his paint-ings. The year 1937 was the year of his first monograph, published in New York and curated by the American journalist Nedda Arnova, of the publication of his “Bologna Art Bulletin” and of the develop-ment of his own style, a synthesis of light, form and color. In 1940 he was invited to the XXII Biennale of Venice where he had a full section dedicated to his paintings. Dur-ing the same year Guidi started to

Isola di San Giorgio, eary 30's, oil on board, 19.6 x 23.6 in.

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identify some of his theoretical and compositional signatures such as the likeness of female figurer like in his painting “La Visita”. Between 1947 and 1950 the artist painted several marine landscapes utilizing pure color planes depicting Venice

and its lagoon and the metaphysi-cal yet dynamic “Figures in Space” the same year he will join Lucio Fontana’s the Spatialist movement and will participate in the XXIV Venice Biennale. In the following three years Guidi’s artistic output

San Giorgio, 1968-69, oil on canvas, 19.6 x 23.6 in. Marina con balaustra, 1971-72, oil on canvas, 27.6 x 35.4 in.

followed his most recognizable painting series such as “Figures in Space”, “Presences” “Anguish”, “Heads” and “Marine”. In the fol-lowing years the artist participated in the XXVII and XXXII Venice Bien-nale, always featured in a separate

dedicated showroom. Between the years of 1969-70 Guidi started his new series on the theme of “The Tree”. The artist died in Venice on January 7 1984.

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San Giorgio, 1974, oil on canvas, 11.8 x 15.7 in. San Giorgio, mid 70's, oil on canvas, 15.7 x 19.6 in.

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Bacino di San Marco, 1976, oil on canvas, 19.6 x 23.6 in. Occhi nello spazio, 1976, oil on canvas, 11.8 x 15.7 in

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Riccardo Licata(Turin 1929 - Venice 2014)

After a brief stay in Paris, his fam-ily moved to Rome, where he lived from 1935 to 1945. In 1946 Licata moved with his mother to Venice. In 1949 he formed a group of young artists with a tendency towards abstractionism. The others were painters Ennio Finzi, Tancredi, Bruno Blenner and sculptor Gior-gio Zennaro. His “graphic-pictorial writing”, inspired by music, began to take shape.In 1950 he enrolled at the Acca-demia di Belle Arti in Venice where he attended painting courses held by Bruno Saetti. The most impor-tant art critics in Venice at the time

– Giuseppe Mazzariol, Giuseppe Marchiori, Umbro Apollonio, Silvio Branzi, Berto Morucchio and Toni Toniato – began to take an interest in his work.He took part with a large mosaic in the Venice Biennale of 1952. In 1953 he was at the Triennale in Mi-lan and he won the First Prize for En-graving at the Biennale dei Giovani in Gorizia. The following year, in 1954, he exhibited again at the Bi-ennale in Venice. He met Gino Sev-erini. In 1955 he was invited to the Biennale in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and won the First Prize for Painting at the Biennale dei Giovani in Gorizia.

In 1956 he exhibited at the Quadri-ennale in Rome, and had a gallery of his own for his engravings at the Biennale in Venice, and also won the First Prize from the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa. The following year he was awarded a scholarship and moved to Paris as an assistant of Gino Severini in the professor-ship of mosaics.He settled in Paris in 1957 and started frequenting the studios of Stanley Hayter, Johnny Fried-laender and Henri Goetz, as well as artists and critics such as Mat-ta, Brauner, Huntertwasser, Lebel, Jouffroy and the Italians Tancredi and Mondino.Licata later took part in the Ven-

ice Biennales of 1964, 1970 and 1972 (partecipating at 9 Venice Biennals overall), in the Quadrien-nale in Rome, in the biennales of Paris, Alexandria, Sao Paulo, and in the most important international graphics biennales (Ljubljana, To-kyo, Mulhouse, Krakow, Reykjavik, Berlin, etc.).Solo exhibitions of his works have been put on in the most important cities in Italy and in Paris, Hel-sinki, Sao Paulo, London, Dublin, Malmo, Mulhouse, Lille, Poitiers, Auxerre, Rouen, Barcelona, Brus-sels, Nice, Amsterdam, Grenoble, Taipei, Ghent, Stockholm, Munich, etc. Counting so far more then 300 solo exhibitions.

Untitled, 1956, oil on paper glued on canvas, 23.6 x 35.4 in.

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Untitled, 1987, tempera on canvas, 17.8 x 22.5 in. Untitled, 2006, oil and acrylic on canvas, cm. 100x150

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Untitled, 2007, oil on canvas, ø 47.2 in. Untitled, 2009, mixed tecnique on canvas, 37.8 x 57.5 in.

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Untitled, 2011, oil and acrylic on canvas, cm. 100x150

Untitled, 2012, oil on canvas, 27.5 x 39.3 in. Untitled, 2012, oil on canvas, 23.6 x 31.5 in.

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Untitled, 2012, mixed tecnique on canvas, 9.5 x 7.1 in. Untitled, 2013, oil on canvas, 7.1 x 19.5 in.

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Gino Morandis(Venice, 1915-1994)

Gino Morandis attended the re-nowned Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice under the guidance of Ital-ian painter and poet Virgilio Guidi whom he will later follow to Bolo-gna’s Fine Art Academy, together with his friend L. Gaspari. In Bolo-gna, Morandi attended renowned painter Giorgio Morandi’s classes thus enriching Guidi’s teachings about light and concentrating on the emotional value of color nu-ances. In 1932, at a very young

age, Morandis began to exhibit his artworks by participating in a Col-lective Exhibition organized by the Foundation Bevilacqua La Masa.The artist, who graduated in paint-ing in 1937, exhibited at the Sec-ond Quadrennial in Rome in 1935 but was soon enrolled in the army in 1938 and forced to give up his art until 1943.From 1943 to 1945, Morandis be-came Guidi teaching assistant in Bologna; he later taught fine arts Untitled, 1954 oil on canvas, 46.5 x 31.5 in.

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at the Venice Art School and at the Venice Academy of Fine Arts. To-wards the end of the forties, Mo-randis and his friends Gaspari and Bacci were very much in the center of cultural activities in ‘the city on the lagoon”, often participating to artistic debates that followed the re-opening of the Biennale with its his-toric 1948 edition. In the early fifties Morandis will become a member of the Spatial Art Movement and met gallerist C. Cardazzo; as a spatial-ist, he participated, in 1952, to two seminal group shows: in Venice at Galleria del Cavallino and in Trieste at Casanova Gallery.In the fifties, Morandis artwork took on a special role within the spatial movement due to his particular sensibility to color nuances, ac-

companied by a strong formal vo-cation which led him to develop a pure language of abstraction to ex-press the imaginary universe of his personal introspection.In 1951 he won the Saviat prize at the Michetti Prize and in 1964 he won the national competition to paint the frescoes for the New General Hospital of the University of Padua. He later participated in many significant national and international exhibitions among which the Venice Biennale edi-tions of 1936, 1948, 1950, 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958, 1962 and 1968 (where he had his own showroom) and in the Quadrennial in Rome, editions of 1935, 1951, 1955, 1959, 1972.

Untitled, 1970, mixed tecnique on board, 39.3 x 39.3 in.

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Untitled, 1987, mixed tecnique on canvas,13.8 x 19.7 in. Untitled, 1988, mixed tecnique on board, 13.8 x 18.5

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Untitled, 1989, mixed tecnique on board, 10 x 13.8 in. Untitled, 1991, mixed tecnique on canvas, 21.3 x 28 in.

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Untitled, 1991, mixed tecnique on canvas, 21.3 x 28 in. Sequenze in viola, 1991, mixed tecnique on canvas, 39.8 x 71.3 in.

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Emilio Vedova(Venice, 1919 – 2006)

Self-taught as an artist he attended for a short period the evening deco-ration classes at the Carmini school. About 1942 he joined the group Corrente, which also included Re-nato Birolli, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti, and Umberto Vittorini. Ve-dova participated in the Resistance movement from 1943. In 1946 he collaborated with Morlotti on the manifesto Oltre Guernica in Milan and was a founding member of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti in Venice. In this period he began his Geometrie nere series, black and white paint-ings influenced by Cubist spatiality. Vedova’s first solo show in the United States was held at the Cath-

erine Viviano Gallery in New York in 1951. In the same year he was awarded the prize for young paint-ers at the first São Paulo Bienal. In 1952 he participated in the Gruppo degli Otto. Vedova was represented at the first Documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1955 and won a Guggen-heim International Award in 1956. He executed his first lithographs in 1958. In 1959 he created large L-shaped canvases, called Scontri di situazioni, which were exhibited in a black environment created by Carlo Scarpa for the exhibition Vital-ità nell’arte, which opened at Pala-zzo Grassi, Venice, and traveled to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Untitled, ciclo '61, 1961, oil on canvas, 38 x 29,5 in.

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Vedova was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the 1960 Ven-ice Biennale, the year in which he created moving light sets and cos-tumes for Luigi Nono’s opera In-tolleranza ’60. This led to the first Plurimi in 1961–63: freestand-ing, hinged, and painted sculpture/paintings made of wood and met-al. From 1963 to 1965, Vedova worked in Berlin, at the Deutsche Akademischer Austausch Dienst, and created his best knownPlu-rimi, the Absurdes Berliner Tage-buch ‘64, presented at Documenta III, Kassel. From 1965 to 1969 (and in 1988), he succeeded Oskar Ko-koschka as Director of the Interna-tionale Sommerakademie in Sal-

zburg. In 1965 and 1983 he trav-eled in the United States, where he lectured extensively. For the Italian Pavilion at Expo ’67, Montreal, he created a light-collage using glass plates to project mobile images across a large asymmetric space. Vedova taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice, from 1975 to 1986. Since the late 1970s, he has experimented with a variety of new techniques and formats such as the Plurimi-Binari (mobile works on steel rails), monotypes, dou-ble-sided circular panels (Dischi), and large-scale glass engraving. In 1995 he began a new series of mul-tifaceted and manipulable painted objects called Disco-Plurimo.

Untitled, 1973, mixed tecnique on canvas, 27.6 x 19.7 in.

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Del Nostro tempo, 1976, oil on board, cm. 19.7 x 27.6 in. Untitled, 1976, oil on canvas, cm. 39.3 x 39.3 in.

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Untitled, 1982, mixed tecnique on carboard, 40.5 x 28.3 in Untitled, 1982, mixed tecnique on cardboard, 28.3 x 40.5 in.

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Emerging, 1985, oil on paper, 12.6 x 18.9 in Ciclo Oltre,1986, oil on canvas, 19.7 x 15.7 in

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Carmelo Zotti(Trieste, 1933 – Treviso, 2007)

one at Museo d’Arte Moderna Cà Pesaro di Venezia (1995) and at Museo della Permanente di Milano (2007). Zotti’s style immediately outgrew the provincial environment he grew up in to embrace a more international taste based on a Sur-realist matrix. In Venice Zotti devel-oped his passion for an Imaginary and Mythical world, fed by his trav-els in Egypt, India, Myanmar and Mexico and supported by his mas-ter Bruno Saetti. His artistic tem-perament brought him to enhance his symbolic attitude toward colors and signs, through a painting dis-tinguished by remembrances and eastern urges. Therefore, from the

Zotti spent his childhood in Tri-este and moved to Venice in 1945, where he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti under the tutelage of Bruno Saetti. In 1954 the artist won the first prize of the Opera Bevilac-qua La Masa and in 1956, partici-pates for the first time in the Bien-nale di Venezia. In 1958 Zotti also won the first prize at the Biennale Internazionale Dei Giovani and the Premio Longo at the XXXII Biennale in Venice. These awards lead to a very successful career for the art-ist, which get him featured in the most important international art shows and in several solo exhibi-tions, among which the prestigious Venere, 1974, oil on canvas,49.2 X 32.3 in.

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sixties onward, his peculiar style marks out dreamlike and meta-physical memories of a fantastic universe full of lyrical and horrific elements. Later on Zotti changed his style of painting towards a less restricted approach, the colors got more vibrant and his artworks got closer to an expressionist style. When he reaches the maturity of

his career, his painting became more histrionic and characterized by a more primordial sense of color.Later on Zotti developed a completely personal approach, in which repre-sentation and abstraction, remem-brance and history, coexist harmo-niously. He worked as a professor of painting at Accademia di Belle Arti of Venice from 1973 to 1990.

Fauno, 1978, oil on canvas, 39.3 x 31.5 in Figure, 1987, oil on canvas, 39.3 x 27.6 in.

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Adamo ed Eva, 1986, oil on canvas, 59 x 51.2 in. La lusinga, 1987, oil on canvas, 70.8 x 78.7 in.

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Figure con palma, 1988, oil on canvas, 39.3 x 33.5 in. Figura con palma, 1998, oil on canvas, 31.5 x 39.3 in.