Guggenheim Venezia
Sixty years after Osvaldo Licini’s death, Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection celebrates the artist with a retrospective curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Associate Curator of the prestigious museum. The retrospective, entitled Osvaldo Licini 1894 – 1958 (open from September 22nd 2018 to January 13th 2019) is a tribute to the strength, the will, the magic behind the artist’s painting and his use of colours, which make him a prominent figure in the Italian artistic scene of the first half of the Twentieth century.
With about one hundred paintings located in 11 rooms, the exhibition displays the sensational artistic career of the painter, who was in contact with the international Parisian artistic milieu, where he met Modigliani and study Cubism. His heart, though, remained in Monte Vidon Corrado, Marche, the town where he was born, among the landscapes that shaped his childhood and where he spent most of his adult life. In his paintings, as powerful as poetry, the cerebral geometric rationalism is in contrast with colour, creativity, pictorial stroke and the feeling they convey. In the vibrant surfaces he portrays, subjects seem to dissolve in several sensorial realities. Licini’s big and small masterpieces are placed next to Fausto Melotti’s and Lucio Fontana’s sculptures, where geometries and lines repeat symmetrically, thus reaffirming the central role played by Osvaldo Licini’s works for Italian art in the Twentieth century.