contessanally: Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection – Peggy Guggenheim Collection - Osvaldo Licini

Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Osvaldo Licini - Let Sheer Folly Sweep Me Away

“He who seeks certainty rarely finds it.”
Osvaldo Licini

At the twenty-ninth Venice Biennale in 1958, an artist from the Italian region of the Marches, Osvaldo Licini (1894–1958) was awarded the Grand Prize for painting, a homage to one of the most original and elusive personalities of the Italian art scene of the first half of the twentieth century. Sixty years after that important recognition and his death, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection commemorates the great master with the long-awaited retrospective Osvaldo Licini - Let Sheer Folly Sweep Me Away, until January 14, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero.

http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/inglese/exhibitions/licini/index.html

Osvaldo Licini - A Character and the Moon - 1949

Olio su tela / Oil on canvas - 27,5 × 36 cm

Private collection - Rome

Osvaldo Licini - Self-portrait - 1913

Oil on cardboard - 37 x 29 cm

Collection Lorenzo Licini

Nude – 1925 - Nude – 1926 - Portrait of Nanny – 1925

Oil on canvas

Osvaldo Licini - Landscape of the Marches (The Trough)

1928 - reworked1942 - oil on canvas - 64 x 80,5 cm

Collection Silvia Poli Licini

The exhibition retraces the disruptive and tormented artistic path of Licini, whose career was characterized by moments of crisis and seemingly sudden stylistic changes. It intends to convey the substantial coherence of this path. Apparent breaks are actually the stages of a singular experience that stand out in the history of twentieth-century art for their absolute lyricism and poetry.

Osvaldo Licini – Study for Imaginary Landscape (Billy Goat) 1927 - pencil on paper

The exhibition begins with his first figurative phase of the 1920s, inspired by the landscapes of the Marches, those hills to which Licini consistently returned in his painting. These views with their curved horizon line are the background in the subsequent transition from figuration to abstraction of the early 1930s, seen in Imaginary Landscape (Billy Goat) from 1927.

Composition: Twilight – 1932 – Nocturne -1932-33 - Composition No.1

oil on canvas

Lucio Fontana – Abstract Sculpture – 1934

iron – black paint on bronze base

Osvaldo Licini – Bird 2 – ca.1936

Enamel on board

In the 1930s Licini turned to nonfigurative work and partook in the cultural ferment of 1930s Milan, the driving force of Italian Abstraction and Rationalism. It was inevitable that he would become involved in the activities of the Galleria Il Milione. Licini’s abstract language is atypical, attentive to geometry. It is a geometry that is permeated with lyricism and turned into sentiment. Such a particular stance could only attract equally sophisticated collectors and the interest of many Italian intellectuals.

Archipainting – 1937

Oil on canvas

Osvaldo Licini – Tasting - 1934-36

Oil on canvas - 22,8 X 27,6 cm

Collection Augusto and Francesca Giovanardi

A Large Character – 1945 – A Character – 1946

Flying Dutchman – Blue - ca.1944

Licini’s career and masterpieces dedicated to the Flying Dutchmen, Amalasunthas, and Rebel Angels hang in “unstable balance” (the title and subject of various works of the 1930s) between abstraction and representation. Licini’s most iconic works are those dedicated to the subject of Amalasuntha, presented as a group at the Venice Biennale in 1950.

Photo Alvise Aspesi - copyright Osvaldo Licini - SIAE 2018 – courtesy

Peggy Guggeneheim Collection

Osvaldo Licini – Amalasuntha No. 1 - 1949

Oil on canvas – 81 x 100 cm

Maramotti Collection – Reggio Emilia

The numerous Amalasuntha paintings on exhibit present the many facets of Licini’s personality, from the lyrical and contemplative side to the more ironic and irreverent one. In the works created since the late 1940s, themes, styles, and unresolved thoughts on painting all converge and make Licini emerge as a great protagonist of Italian and international modernism, as confirmed by the award conferred a few months before his death at the Venice Biennale in 1958.