De Buck Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming group exhibition entitled “A New Visual Dialogue,” which will bring together works by pre-eminent post-war Italian artists including Alberto Biasi, Dadamaino, Lucio Fontana, Giorgio Griffa, Pino Pinelli, Turi Simeti and Nanda Vigo. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery in New York from October 9 through November 8, 2014, with viewings also available in Saint Paul de Vence, France and Antwerp, Belgium.
De Buck Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition entitled A New Visual Dialogue, which will bring together works by Italian masters ranging from the 1950s to present. Inspired by Lucio Fontana’s influence and the impact of the Zero movement, the exhibition highlights the shared minimalist tendencies that sprang up in the Italian art scene during the 1950s and 1960s. A three-part exhibition with viewing opportunities in New York, Saint Paul de Vence and Antwerp, A New Visual Dialogue will include works by Alberto Biasi, Dadamaino, Lucio Fontana, Giorgio Griffa, Pino Pinelli, Turi Simeti and Nanda Vigo. An opening reception will be held in the New York gallery on October 9, from 4:30-8 PM and in Antwerp on November 21 from 5-9 PM, and a catalogue will be available on the occasion of this exhibition with an essay by Elena Forin of Larete Art Projects.
By the mid-twentieth century, Italy had started both politically and culturally to recover from the horrors of the Second World War, and entered into a global artistic discussion. Brought together by the work and philosophy of Lucio Fontana, a transplant from Argentina who is represented in this exhibition with his 1959 Concetto Spaziale, Attese, groups of young artists together developed an artistic language based upon minimalism and a desire to transform the physical presence of the work. Prominent among these were artists associated with a global movement called Zero, which will be featured in an exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim museum this fall, and the related Italian offshoot, Azimut.
Directly or indirectly, it is these movements that link the artists included in A New Visual Dialogue. Each utilized the example set by Fontana’s Spazialismo to develop their own independent interpretation of how to best pursue a simple and meaningful art through abstract forms. The physical transformation of the three-dimensional surface, through Fontana’s slashes, Dadamaino’s holes, Simeti’s ovular protrusions or the building up, in the work of Pinelli, Vigo, and Biasi, or breaking down of surfaces by Griffa, does this and is the key shared element of the work of the selected seven artists, and many others working in Italy and elsewhere during this period.
This exhibition brings together some of the most important names and trends in post-war Italian art. Many of these artists were inspired, directly or indirectly, by the global Zero movement, a vastly overlooked artistic reaction to the Second World War and previous art movements, initially founded in Germany by Heinz Macke and Otto Piene. In recent years, Zero has gained a tremendous increase in critical attention.
