PARIS.- Tornabuoni Art is presenting an exhibition dedicated to the Italian artist, Alberto Biasi. Organized in close collaboration with the artist, this is his first solo show with Tornabuoni Art Paris, centered on the important role he played and continues to play today in Kinetic art.
The exhibition brings together emblematic artworks of Alberto Biasi’s lifelong commitment to the study of movement started in 1959 when he founded Gruppo N. This selection of works shows the artist’s will to question the traditional conception of painting by challenging the “classic” perspective and focusing his attention on retinal expriments and visual effects of his works.
Born in 1937 in Padua, Alberto Biasi was among the top-level class of Industrial Design at the Institute of Architecture in Venice and cofounded Gruppo N in 1959 with Ennio Chiggio, Toni Costa, Edoardo Landi and Alfredo Massironi. With them he conducted his first “opticodynamic” experiments that brought him to participate in 1960 in exhibitions dedicated to lumino-kinetic art alongside Enrico Castellani, Piero Manzoni and artists of the New Artistic Conceptions and Nuove Tendenze (New Art Practice) movements.
In the beginning of the 1960s, he began his study of the Trame (Wefts), superimpositions of cotton gauzes, metallic wiring or perforated postcards, gradually twisted to form variable and progressive constellations. He continued his work through the 2000s with his Rilievi otticodinamici (Optico-dynamic Reliefs) where lines and light intertwine and appear to be on the same level even though they are separated by a few centimeters. He paid tribute to Lucio Fontana in his 1960 Torsioni (Twists) where the canvases were entirely cut into strips, then recomposed to form different shapes and torsions. The torsions seem to change according to the viewer’s position in front of the canvas, creating moving geometrical configurations. Later came the Ambienti (Spaces), seen as experimental spaces where the image of a drawing coexists with reality, offering the viewer the feeling of visual, spatial and temporal instability.
The gallery is presenting for the first time outside of Italy, Light Prisms, exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1964 and at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 1970. Light Prisms, installed in a dark room specially made for this occasion, required a year and a half’s worth of work and is made of mixed media such as wood, plastic, glass and methacrylate, electric motors and light projectors. The artwork that Biasi calls Fenêtre sur arc-en-ciel (Window on a rainbow) is a shifting composition made of rays of light that continuously appear and disappear and change colours. These rainbow light effects reveal the artwork to the spectator and testify Alberto Biasi’s talent to translate new and original images in a non-pictorial way.
Following the dissolution of the Gruppo N in 1967, Alberto Biasi started a more personal research on forms and movement with his Politipi (Polyptychs), a complex cycle he continued to work on through the 1990s in which he gradually adds color and more figurative shapes. Since the early 2000s, Biasi has been synthesizing his multiple experiments that have contributed to the international recognition of Kinetic Art, creating in particular the Assemblaggi (Assemblages), primarily diptychs and triptychs made of plastic and impressive colours.
As well as the 12 exhibitions in which he participated with the Gruppo N, Biasi has had more than 20 solo shows and has participated in more than 400 group shows such as the Venice Biennale, The São Paulo Art Biennale, the Rome Quadriennale and more recently at the Musée Tinguely in Basel (2014) and during the AZIMUT/H. Continuità e nuovo exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
