Insieme (Alberto Biasi)
Year: 1991
Technique: Tecnica mista su tavola
Dimensions: 71 × 67 cm
A founding member of the groundbreaking Italian artist collective Gruppo N, Alberto Biasi (Padua, 1937) is a kinetic and Op art pioneer. He creates seemingly vibrating works with illusory tricks and precise geometry. Biasi was greatly inspired by Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto, whose kinetic sculptures he encountered at the 1958 Venice Biennale. In his own work, the artist explores the possibilities of mixing materials—including PVC strips, cotton gauzes, metal wires, and perforated cardboard—to create dizzying optical illusions that straddle two and three dimensions. From his earliest series, “Trame” (1959–60), which features frames that filter light to create a constellation like effect, to his later moire-like works made of multicolored PVC strips on painted wooden boards, Biasi challenges perception through his dynamic use of color and light. Since Gruppo N’s disbandment in 1967, Biasi has exhibited in more than 100 solo exhibitions and 500 group shows, including the pivotal 1965 survey of Op and kinetic art, “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art, and in prestigious international presentations, including representing Italy at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and 1986, as well as the São Paulo Bienal in 1971.
M77 presents The visibility of the invisible, an exhibition project dedicated to the artist Alberto Biasi (Padua, 1937), curated by Alberto Salvadori and specially devised for the spaces of this gallery. The exhibition will be open to the public from Monday 17 May to Sunday 19 September 2021, compatibly with the possible restrictions due to developments in the pandemic.
Alberto Biasi is one of the most important personalities of post-war Italian art: Programmed Art pioneer and co-founder of the historic Gruppo N, Biasi has focused his artistic quest on optic-kinetic research extending to the creation of installations, ambient settings, and more recently, sculptures.
With this exhibition, M77 and curator Alberto Salvadori wished to return to the origins of the Padua- born artist’s very long career, highlighting primarily its gestalt and experiential aspects, along with the revolutionary role that he performed to introduce the concept of ambient/artwork into Italy. The four ambient settings and the installation exhibited at M77 are not based just on space and light, but also, and above all, on the people who visit the worlds that the artist has prepared for them: spectators, with their reactions and responses to the artist’s estranging proposals, are the true protagonists of the work.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue constructed around a text in which curator Alberto Salvadori develops and reconnects the themes developed during a detailed discussion with the artist. The volume comprises archive materials on the works exhibited, a carefully-researched biography of Biasi, and a bibliography. The images are provided by installation views of the exhibition itself.
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