In Venice an exhibition on Vasco Bendini, avant-garde of abstraction
From 5 June to 30 September 2022, ACP Palazzo Franchetti brings back to Venice, after an absence of several decades, the art of Vasco Bendini, avant-garde of the Italian abstract movement. On display works from 1958 to 1970.
From 5 June to 30 September 2022, ACP Palazzo Franchetti a Venice dedicates an exhibition to Vasco Bendini (Bologna, 1922 – Rome, 2015) on the centenary of his birth. The exhibition is entitled Vasco Bendini. Gesture and matter and comes in conjunction with the extensive retrospective underway at GNAM – National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome. Furthermore, the exhibition comes after a long absence in the lagoon city: thus, ACP – Art Capital Partners Palazzo Franchetti and Major Art Gallery gamwho collaborated in the initiative, bring Bendini’s art back to Venice after its last appearance at the 1972 Biennale, curated by Renato Barilli and Francesco Arcangeli.
The exhibition aims to be an opportunity to rediscover the multifaceted production of an artist who is tireless in perpetuating an eclectic expressive research with the most diversified means of expression, but always fueled by the desire to deepen the cognitive dimension of his own being. Bendini is a forerunner of trends, forerunner of the Informal and initiator of Arte Povera. The exhibition through a selection of works that starts from the fifties, the informal period, passing through the sixties, follows the evolution of Bendini’s research that comes to touch the performative art in order not to stop in front of the challenge of polymateriality in the following decades .
Vasco Bendini (Bologna 1922 – Rome 2015) is the protagonist of an artistic path that often sees him as a precursor. It is an itinerary that hides its coherence, going from time to time to investigate the presence of images that are revealed through a tireless and pioneering renewal of techniques and languages. Between 1941 and 1942 Vasco Bendini attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, where he was taught by Giorgio Morandi and Virgilio Guidi. It is from their lesson that the artist moves the first towards a Metaphysical painting, but the figurative element will disintegrate in an abstract sense as early as 1948, under the corrosiveness of an impetuous gesture that will soon be accompanied by a materiality capable of investigating, in the multiplicity of its forms, the light revealing power. The progression towards a disintegration of the image follows the suggestions suggested by the theories of modern quantum physicsaccording to which our perception of reality in the form of matter is nothing more than an illusory trace of mobile compounds, made of waves and particles.
The progressive formal disintegration that can be seen in Bendini’s works speaks of this reflection: starting from 1950 the colors become liquid, the painting expands nebula, guiding the viewer towards the presence of increasingly dematerialized and fluctuating faces and bodies until they flow, between the 1958 and 1959, towards that climate of the Italian Informal of which Bendini is one of the masters. The possibility of direct reading of the image disappears, but inherent in the artist’s visual language is the constant presence of a flagrant figuration, yet to be revealed. The works presented in the exhibition span from 1958 to 1970: some of them are significant in its informal phase, others introduce the object discourse of the early 1960s, when the author’s tireless research begins to produce a certain sensitivity in determination precocious of those subsequent languages defined as Poor artof which Bendini reveals himself to be anticipated.
Like Barilli, the “poor” materials aggregated to Bendini’s canvases in this phase, balanced with those of traditional pictorial origin, the Funk taste for waste, which had marked the end of the 1960s, is maintained and perhaps enhanced in the decade of the the seventies with the “found objects” on the type of egg containers and flaps of twisted and wrinkled fabrics, as if it were the layer of the pictorial paste that wriggled and wriggled. Driven by the urgency of an identity search, “spirit and matter”, “thought and senses” to use the words of Maurizio Calvesi, he will know the art of Bendinerà the most varied vocabularies and techniques. Accompanied by the pen of illustrious critics such as Argan, Barilli, Arcangeli and Calvesi, the artist obtained in 1964 a personal room at the 32. La Biennale di Venezia, which will be followed by one at the 36. La Biennale di Venezia (1972).
Finally, his first anthology is in 1968, to inaugurate an intense activity that will last until 2015, the year of the end of a long career dedicated to research always aimed at probing in depth the ineffable entity of his own essence. Presenting works created between 1958 and 1970, the ACP Palazzo Franchetti exhibition offers the opportunity to get to know the artistic evolution of one of the great precursors of avant-garde art up close.
For all information it is possible visit the ACP Palazzo Franchetti website.
Image: Vasco Bendini, Without title (1969; powder colors and oil on canvas, 110 x 110 cm). By permission of Galleria d’Arte Maggiore gam, Bologna / Milan / Paris
Information on the exhibition
In Venice an exhibition on Vasco Bendini, avant-garde of abstraction |
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