Background
Beatrice (Bice) Lazzari was born in Venice on November 15, 1900 to Lorenzo (Luciano) Lazzari and Francesca Rinaldo. She was the second of three sisters, the youngest of whom, Onorina (Nini), married architect Carlo Scarpa.
Beatrice (Bice) Lazzari was born in Venice on November 15, 1900 to Lorenzo (Luciano) Lazzari and Francesca Rinaldo. She was the second of three sisters, the youngest of whom, Onorina (Nini), married architect Carlo Scarpa.
Initially she enrolled at the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello than, Impassioned by painting, she enrolled at Venice’s Academy of Fine Arts studying ornament and decoration.
Bice proved to be a capable landscape painter, and her work had affinity with the Burano school of painters who, in the 1920s, continued the Venetian tradition of landscape painting, dedicating themselves to the island of Burano.
In 1924 she exhibited for the first time, with a Still Life to the exhibition of works at Opera Bevilacqua La Masa, and in 1929 had her first solo exhibition at the San Moisè gallery.
Venice’s artistic scene in the 1930s was animated by circles of artists such as the Circolo Artistico of Palazzo dei Piombi and the Café on the Zattere, where she met Carlo Scarpa and Mario de Luigi, and started her affiliation with the avant-garde movement and rationalist research If as a painter she looked for her affirmation in the naturalistic landscape, she completely broke with the figurative tradition in the applied arts by choosing abstract design and geometric compositions as her means of expression.
In 1935, Lazzari moved to Rome, where she contributed by creating murals and decorative panels for the installation of large state-organized exhibitions. In the 1950s Lazzari received real recognition for the first time: in 1951 she had a solo exhibition in La Cassapanca gallery in Rome, followed three years later by another show at the Schneider gallery. In 1958 she exhibited at the Galleria d’Arte del Cavallino in Venice, and again in Rome at La Salita gallery.
In 1959 Lazzari abandoned oil painting to explore new materials, such as glue, sand, tempera and, later, acrylic. Her interest in the ‘informal’, which had begun in 1957, also came to an end in 1963. The artist began again from the beginning in 1964, abandoning her traditional materials and palette in order to find a more simplified means of expression, often applying lines of graphite to a monochrome background. The series of acrylics produced towards the end of the 1960s and 70s demonstrate the extraordinary lyricism and modernity that typify Lazzari’s work of this last phase of her artistic career and consolidate her position as a leading protagonist of post-war Italian art. Bice Lazzari died in Rome on November 13, 1981.
524-A
1978Acrilico K
1979Acrilico n. 12
1976Acrilico no. 13
1976Astrazione di una linea n. 2, disegno
1925Autoritratto
1929Composizione
1951Diario
1954Grigio + Giallo (Gray and Yellow)
1966Indicazione
1964L-11 (detail)
1950La linea rossa
1966Red and White Signals
1930Racconto n. 2
1955Rhythm
1956Senza titolo
1952Senza titolo
1964Senza titolo (detail)
1966Untitled
1964Untitled
1975Quotations: "I choose the mark … because I can more clearly formulate a discourse that may easily be read. The mark because it traces a vital tension in relation to other marks, which collectively become more significant and complete an inner process … The mark because it determines alternative spaces that could appear interconnected, creating the possibility of perceiving various planes, conceptually ordered and with a non-objective rigour that I would define as the ‘objective of reduction’. Colour also contributes to the discourse that in music I could define as ‘accompaniment’ – selecting only absolute colours: white, black, red and yellow … At times the elements group together like repeated sounds to create a focal centre that can move freely beyond the boundaries of my available space, to create an unblocked image. The freedom to act on the canvas is always the most important requirement that I know."
In 1941 Bice married the Venetian architect Diego Rosa.