VALENCIA, SPAIN.- From 19 November 2004 to 30 January 2005 the IVAM is exhibiting a selection of works from all the series and artistic periods of the Venetian artist Ida Barbarigo. The show includes paintings in oils and on paper of Informel mosaics derived from Futurism, chairs, spectres with mythological names such as the Saturni (Saturns), and the innumerable small figures of the Terrestri (Earthlings).

Ida Barbarigo has taken part in many group exhibitions, among others in the Salon de Mai in Paris, at the Maison de la Culture in Caen, and at the Kunstverein in Wolfsburg, Germany, with the exhibition entitled 6 Pariser Maler. In 1972 there was a retrospective of her work at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and she has had solo exhibitions in a variety of European galleries. One of her most recent exhibitions was in May 2000 at the Fundación BBK in Bilbao, where she showed her latest work, consisting of series in which the paint has darkened.

The present exhibition, which is the first retrospective of this artist to be organized by a Spanish museum, is accompanied by a documented catalogue which reproduces the works displayed, together with pictures and photographs of the artist, and texts by Sabine Schulze, Michael Peppiatt, Kosme de Barañano and Gerard Régnier, director of the Musée Picasso in Paris.

Ida Barbarigo was born in Venice in 1925 and comes from a family of artists, architects and sculptors. She gave up studying architecture in order to study painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. Her work has been influenced by many painters, such as Giotto and Cimabue, and by the art of early civilizations. Her restlessness and curiosity led her to travel, and in 1952 she moved to Paris. During the first years of her activity drawing acquired great importance for her, and gradually she formed a personal way of seeing, her own way of creating, which she developed especially in the fields of painting and engraving. After an early figurative period she formed a personal style with work tending towards abstraction

From 1959 onwards she lived in both Venice and Paris, coming into contact with other artists, critics and art historians such as Léon Gischia, Jean Bouret and Pierre Francastel. She married another artist, Zoran Music. In 1978 she returned to her native Venice and installed herself in an old studio where she says she has rediscovered the atmosphere of the house where she was born.

Her first theme was the chairs in the squares of Venice and Paris, in the series Le seggiole (Chairs). Barbarigo worked on this subject repeatedly from 1961 to 1976, in a series of oils and small watercolours in which the chair is treated as a structural, compositional element. Her paintings are the outcome of a series of jottings taken from life, notes of the places and scenes which captivate her most, such as cafes, terraces and squares. The titles of her paintings are often snatches of conversations overheard by chance, words uttered by some of the occasional occupants of the chairs.

In the eighties she began to paint self-portraits and pictures of flowers and leaves, and also other series, such as those of judges, nudes and the beach, with a style that is always evocative, halfway between figuration and abstraction.