CAGLIARI.- The incessant abstract, geometric and chromatic research of one of the most important Italian artists of the 20th century, one hundred years after her birth: at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte of Cagliari, from 26 November, it is possible to visit Lia Drei - Forme e geometrie della luce, an exhibition that, through 24 works from all phases of her artistic development, displays the artistic evolution of Lia Drei and her constant investigation of the shape-color perception.
The exhibition, organized by the
Department of Culture and Entertainment of the Municipality of Cagliari and by the Musei Civici, is curated by Teodolinda Coltellaro and was presented this morning to the press and opened by the mayor of Cagliari Paolo Truzzu, the councilor for Culture and Entertainment Maria Dolores Picciau and by its curator.
Paolo Truzzu said, in his greetings, that “Cagliari is a city that narrates Italian art following original paths and currents and reinterpretations that are always original. This exhibition on Lia Drei is particularly significant for the stature of the artist: a multifaceted personality, an ante litteram feminist, a protagonist of a passionate research path that also links her to our city, thanks to her husband Francesco Guerrieri, a Calabrian by birth but a citizen of Cagliari by adoption. The exhibition thus creates a happy symbiosis with the permanent collections of the Galleria Municipale d’Arte and highlights how, over the years, Cagliari has been a community of a thousand ideas: always versatile, it is never predictable and it is capable of demonstrating its value in all the arts".
“Lia Drei's work – said councilor Maria Dolores Picciau – is an obligatory step in the history of the artistic neo-avantgardes of the 1960s and 1970s. This retrospective exhibition starts on the centenary of her birth and continues the process of enhancing the female world in the figurative arts, promoted by the Department of Culture and Entertainment of the Municipality of Cagliari. Furthermore, it once again places the emphasis on the role of female artists from the second half of the last century and on that large number of women who contributed with their commitment to the revolutionary subversion of Italian culture and to the affirmation and acquisition of an active role in society and in the cultural debate. Lia Drei was an international artist and this exhibition demonstrates how even a peripheral reality like Cagliari can dialogue with the rest of the world, thanks to a good cultural policy that restores impetus to the artistic, expressive and creative energies of the city.”
For the curator of the exhibition Teodolinda Coltellaro, “Lia Drei's creative journey can be defined as an extraordinary research journey, an indomitable quest that directed her steps towards the territories of art, right up to the end of her life. Two terms, “journey” and “research” which, in order to outline her substantial artistic and human depth, are complementary: one amplifies the historical-cultural connotations of an existence, qualifies the operational coordinates which from time to time have characterized the work; the other identifies the fundamental cognitive assumption of a discourse on art, on its gnoseological categories, in an uninterrupted and coherent search for new aesthetic forms and experiential modalities.”
Born in Rome in 1922, daughter of the painter and sculptor Ercole Drei, Lia Drei is an extraordinary woman from the first part of the twentieth century. She breathed and practiced figurative art from the first years of her life in her father's studio at the Strohl-Fern Villa, an imaginative meeting place for many artistic paths in the Capital; she graduated in Literature from La Sapienza University and perfected herself at Columbia University in New York where she will then teach for a few years before returning to Italy; she became an Italian champion in swimming and diving; she was a music lover (her historic guitar is on display) and a scholar of optical, retinal problems and perceptive processes. All these facets of her personality were poured into her artistic production, especially starting from 1963, when, after meeting the painter Francesco Guerrieri (who will become an art and life partner), she will contribute to the establishment of the "Gruppo '63" and the “Binomial Experimental p.” (p. stands for “pure”), formed from the split of the “Gruppo '63”, an experimental artistic movement now fully included in the history of contemporary visual art.
Lia Drei's creative journey thus becomes research and investigation, focused above all on perception and vision. Drei senses the limits of figurative art and begins to break its constraints on the canvas, working on the stratifications of color to create new expressive solutions. Thus, her intense abstract-informal experience is outlined, centered on new structures of vision which in fact initiates fertile periods of linguistic conquests, of unprecedented structural possibilities of shapes and colors, of original application of the scientific method to art. Lia Drei – Forme e geometrie di luce showcases this constant evolution of point of view and expression through 24 works created from the early 1960s until 2005, shortly before her passing.
The exhibition at the Galleria Comunale d'Arte is not intended only to celebrate the centenary of the artist's birth, but also to highlight that Lia Drei's career also explored Cagliari, where, in the 1960s, the painter, together with Guerrieri and various historians of art like Corrado Maltese, she carried out research on perception-shape-colour for the university of the Capital. And two of her works have already found a home in the city, thanks to the Ugo Ugo Collection, a collection of contemporary art that is particularly sensitive to abstract-geometric research, created between the 1960s and 1970s by the artist and director of the Galleria Municipale for almost twenty 'years.
Lia Drei – Forme e geometrie di luce will be at the Galleria Municipale d’Arte of the Public Gardens of Cagliari until 26 February 2023 and will be open from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10.00 to 18.00. The cost of the ticket is the standard price for entrance to the Gallery (6 euros), but discounts and free admissions are available.
